Classic Rooha: The Subway Height Consumption Challenge Editorial (First published May 2005)

by Alex J Allen

sss

It's a lazy Tuesday afternoon in the small village I have come to call home, and some what curiously, I have discovered that my jeans feel a little tighter than usual. It could be because of the nature of fabric to shrink and alter slightly when it has been washed. It could be that a vengeful God has had my jeans tightened as some sort of bizarre punishment. However, the more likely explanation is that I and three other Rooha authors have just attempted to eat our own height in Subway. Yes, that's six feet of bread, filled with any number of different delicious fillings. Stupid? Oh, yes.

aaa

Usually, drunken pub talk stays in the pub. Usually, when I say I'm going to buy an ice cream factory, the morning after I have come to my senses. Usually, things work out differently. Yet despite this, I found myself waking up at 8:04 on a Tuesday morning to attempt to most ridiculous challenge in the history of man. 8:04 is the standard time you really, really have to get out of bed and resist the temptation to hit the snooze button on the alarm clock again if you have any real ambition of catching the 8:25 bus. So the four contenders, Tom, Godfrey, Rich and I sat on the bus heading in to town looking like we'd had the heaviest night out in recent history the night before, and shouldn't have even contemplated setting foot outside this early (all true). However, undeterred, bleary eyed and actually fairly hungry we arrived in town and went to Subway. But wait, no crowds awaiting us upon our arrival? No press? No banners and streamers celebrating the commencement of our challenge? The whole place was practically deserted. Gorging ourselves with sandwiches wasn't proving to be quite the glamorous career I had anticipated. So, in low key, not to mention embarrassing fashion, we got the first round in; Three steak and cheese, one chicken teriyaki.

sss

Round One

sss

It's a very poorly kept secret that I like Subway, perhaps even love it. In fact, we all do, so the 'pace yourself' plan went well and truly out the window as soon as we got the first lot in. Looking around it was now apparent that we had a bit of an audience consisting mainly of the employed, the elderly and other members of the general public, who, based solely on appearance, looked like extras on home owner loan adverts. Receiving pitying looks from those tables was naturally a pretty low point in my life, but we soldiered on unperturbed, mistakenly thinking that a further five feet wasn't going to pose much of a challenge after all. Oh well, we live and learn, with or without a functioning liver.

Round Two

For round two, Rich and Tom decided that in the spirit of pacing themselves and eating as little as possible, they would order the heaviest sub available - The foot long meatball. Call it a tactical error of judgement, or perhaps just fucking stupid, Tom and Rich struggled their way through the second foot. Godfrey meanwhile, was having problems. The 6ft challenge was not proving to offer the glamour or celebrity he had hoped it would upon arriving, and he was finding his second chicken teryaki hard going (although to be honest, for the majority of the population, any amount is too much). I, meanwhile, was just biding my time, eating a second steak and cheese nice and slowly. Just like the tortoise and the hare, albeit slightly more nautious and with a greater sense of inner shame.

Round Three

The third foot saw the party hit the pain barrier, it also saw a calamity ensue with the bread. They'd run out of the good stuff, and all that remained were undesirable alternatives like 'cheese and herb'. I don't want to over step the mark and start telling a major corporation which bread to make, but a whole oven full of cheese and herb? Why? There's just not reason good enough for it, and even if there was I wouldn't want to hear it, I really just want some cold, poorly planned revenge. At two and a half feet I decided to get up and around the bus stop, which managed to produce the combined reaction of illness and refreshment. Godfrey followed suit and subsequently threw up in Subway's sink in front of the various home loan-esque diners. He certainly seemed to have combined all his subs in to one easily manageable load.

Despite his claims to the contrary afterwards, his dreams of completing a full six feet came to a sad and premature end at this point. Finally tally? A fairly piss poor 2.3 feet.

Round Four

It was now abundantly clear that we weren't going to eat six feet either. The prospect of having to buy my clothes from a catalogue called Garments for the Portly Gentleman due to my expanded waistline wasn't something I was looking forward to very much. What happened next was almost certainly a sign of the delusion that had taken me over. I was feeling as though I was about to have my vision, receive a dream from a guiding spirit before going back to my tribe to become a man. Instead, we ended up buying ham subs. Ham? What the hell were we thinking? Ham in Subway is a lot like that Double Decker bar that sits in the vending machine. You assume that somebody must eat them. You don't know who, and frankly, you don't care as long as you aren't involved. However, on this occasion I was persuaded that it would 'refreshing'. Fair enough. Of course, when I think of the word refreshing, I think of, say, a nice cold pint whilst sitting on the beach. Or a nice cold pint whilst relaxing in the garden. At no point in my personal definition however, is there a reference to processed pork products. Call me picky, but how many cubic pigs have you seen? You didn't need to have completed veterinary school to realise that this wasn't Babe that we were about to tuck in to.

Some general rigging and sub fixing ensued as Godfrey decided that he wasn't done and wanted to be let back in to the challenge. That misguided decision was rewarded with a surprise double meat / extra chili sauce combo in his next sub. We struggled on for a while, but eventually faltered and surrendered. Various Subway employees found the failure quite amusing, the joke, of course, was on them, they hadn't seen their sink yet. So, the final length tally: Godfrey 2.3 feet, Rich and I 3.4 feet with Tom out in the lead with 3.9 feet. So, Tom was the victor, although as we attempted to walk back in to Cambridge town centre afterwards it became abundantly clear that there were no real winners at all from this experiment. Feeling as ill as I ever had done, with only the consolation of 21 Subway Saver Stamps as a reward for our endeavours, we went to the pub. Naturally, it will be some time before I am ready to redeem my Subway stamps, or more to the point, am capable of walking there at all.