Hot Dog Eating Champ Miki Sudo on What It Takes to Be a Competitive Eater

It all started with a gargantuan bowl of pho. Now, a decade later, record-breaking competitive eater Miki Sudo is gunning to win her ninth Nathan's Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest during the annual Fourth of July event.

On Tuesday, 35,000 spectators are expected to attend the annual Coney Island competition, which has been held at the corner of Surf and Stillwell avenues outside of the original Nathan's since it opened in 1916, according to the restaurant's website. The contest, which raises money for the Food Bank for New York City, will also air on ESPN.

The women's competition begins at 10:45 a.m. Tuesday EST, while the men's contest will start at 12 p.m. Newsweek has reached out via email to Nathan's representatives for comment.

In a phone interview with Newsweek on Tuesday, Sudo said she has been working on her technique so she can down hot dogs faster right off the bat in hopes that she'll be able to break her world record.

Sudo, 37, set the women's world record in 2020 when she devoured 48.5 Nathan's Famous hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes. Sudo is ranked as the top female and third- best overall competitive eater in the world by Major League Eating (MLE), the organization overseeing all professional eating contests. Only Joey Chestnut and Geoffrey Esper outrank Sudo, according to MLE scores. Chestnut holds the world record for shoveling down 76 hot dogs in 2021 and earned his 15th Nathan's hot dog eating contest title last year. Esper recently won third-straight strawberry shortcake eating record by devouring 21 pounds of the dessert in eight minutes.

"I'm just kind of tweaking my technique to hopefully put up a higher number because I do not like my personal record of 48.5," Sudo told Newsweek. "It's just a very arbitrary kind of number. I'd like to hit 50. Really, I don't even want to hang it up until I get to that 50 mark, and I don't see why I couldn't."

While Sudo didn't compete in 2021 because she was 37 weeks pregnant with her son, she still attended the hot dog eating contest as a commentator for ESPN. In her return to the historic Coney Island competition in 2022, she earned her eighth title.

To train for Nathan's annual contest, which Sudo calls "the big one" in the competitive- eating world, she said there's more to it than just practicing eating mountains of food. Preparation for a competition, Sudo says, has three main components: Physical, strategic and mental.

Sudo said the physical aspect includes working out in addition to practicing eating and competing in MLE contests all over the U.S. For the strategic component, she said she reviews old tapes to help fine-tune her technique. The mental part, which Sudo said is the most important, is where she works on coping skills to push past the discomfort of an incredibly full stomach.

"I like to take care of myself, and for me, that includes a lot of cardio because it helps me build up my tolerance, especially for exerting all that energy outside under the New York sun," Sudo said. "Generally, I just try to take care of my health overall."

Sudo, who lives in Florida with her husband and fellow competitive eater Nick Wehry and their son, shared a video on social media showing what it takes to get ready for Nathan's century-old tradition.

"'How do you prepare for something like Nathan's?' Take a look," she said in a Twitter post, which shows clips of her chowing down on the competitive-eating circuit.

Sudo said she never planned to become a professional competitive eater, let alone the top-ranked woman in the world, and it all started on a "whim."

In 2011, a Vietnamese restaurant in Las Vegas, Nevada, was offering a jackpot of roughly $1,500 to anyone who could finish a colossal 12-pound bowl of pho in the allotted time. Sudo said her friends tried and failed, but when she saw photos of the monster bowl, she decided to give it a try.

"I've always been one to try new things and always down for adventure, so I just kind of decided to give it a try and I plugged away," Sudo said. "I finished this challenge, and then they put me up on a billboard and they started getting requests to do other challenges. Once I realized that there was a competitive circuit, that's when my competitive streak really got the best of me. Here I am, over 10 years later."

When Newsweek asked how she feels after eating four dozen hot dogs in just 10 minutes, Sudo joked that she has to "lean on my Pepcid a lot." She said the post-competition adrenaline is so "powerful" that she doesn't feel uncomfortable until hours later. She said once she gets back to her hotel room after interviews and signing autographs, that's when the food coma hits.

"It's important to just get rehydrated because a lot of what we eat has a good amount of salt, so during interviews you'll see me just chugging water," she said. "While there, the adrenaline takes over, so the discomfort is kind of blocked out for a while. Once I finally get back to my room, I just collapse on the bed and that's when like the sluggishness will kind of finally hit me."

As for how she consumes dozens of hot dogs or gallons of ice cream or hundreds of hot wings, Sudo said it's a combination of "genetics, training and competitive drive."

"I would say the most important component is a competitive drive," Sudo told Newsweek. "Nick and I, for example, we hate losing even more than we like winning, so while it's important to like food, that alone is not going to make you a top competitive eater because a lot of people enjoy eating. If you don't have that drive to win, you're not going to find yourself doing a hot dog practice in 92-degree weather."