The Sock 'Em, Bust 'Em Board Because that's our custom

‘I really need to bring my “A” game.’

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Say hello to Miki Sudo, the top-ranked woman in the world of competitive eating. She’s holding a 10-pound bowl of pho from the Las Vegas restaurant Pho 87. There you’ll find the Phozilla Challenge, when a competitor has 1,987 seconds — 33 minutes, 7 seconds — to finish the whole thing.

She learned about the challenge one day in in 2011 when she was at a basketball game with friends who were passing around their cell phones to share pictures of the bowl and tell their stories about how they tried and failed. Sudo was not impressed. She was incredulous. She tried it the next day and finished it. She banked $1,510, and she’s still the only one to ever do it.

So began Sudo’s career as a competitive eater, and this weekend she’ll be in Fairmont for the Pepperoni Roll Eating World Championship at the Three Rivers Festival.

Matt Stonie set the world record last summer, the second of his back-to-back titles, when he finished 34 in 10 minutes. He’s the top-ranked competitive eater, one spot ahead of Joey Chestnut, who won in 2013. But they’ll both be at different Major League Eating events this weekend, and Sudo has a real chance to win the event after finishing second the past three years.

It’s not that easy, though.

Like, how does Sudo practice? She lives in Las Vegas, and she can never find pepperoni rolls. She arrives in West Virginia today, and she’ll get her utensils on a few just to get reacquainted and remember how she attacked the state’s indigenous food in the past.

But Sudo, as is her custom, doesn’t eat much in the two days before an event, and there’s the conflict. She needs at least some reps, because pepperoni rolls are sort of unique in competitive eating.

“They’re difficult to eat,” she said.

There are secrets some subscribe to in competitive eating, and Sudo has her ways, ones she applies to different events, ones that work. She reserves a certain number of bites for hot dogs. She has a technique for working around bones on ribs and chicken wings.

Pepperoni rolls offer no such luxuries.

“They’re all handmade,” she said. “I wouldn’t say there’s no consistency, but there’s slight variation from one to the next. Every single one of them is not going to be the same size. They’re not necessarily cooked with the same softness or hardness. The pepperoni on the inside can be going in wacky directions. It’s all tricky, but that’s what makes it a fun contest.”