Cait Takes a Break, Cait Takes a Break

Previously published as: Eat Like A GirlTwenty-eight-year-old Caitlin Ulmer has just graduated from Stanford with a PhD in Virology and after twenty-one years in academic harness is burned out. When she and her oddball posse of girlfriends visits a Buffalo Wild Wings at a San Jose shopping mall on the 4th of July to watch the annual Nathan’s Coney Island hot dog eating contest, she is both amazed and confused by what she witnesses there. Why is it that World Eating League phenom Tommy Filbert manages to ingest an astonishing seventy-six frankfurters in a mere ten minutes while the women’s champion can only consume fifty-seven? Cait stands six-foot-two inches tall, won a California state volleyball championship while in high school and a Pac-12 women’s rowing crown while an undergrad at Stanford, has always been able to drink most men under the table, and has for years been accused by her friends of having a hollow leg.Suddenly, Cait knows exactly what she wants to do with her immediate future. In spite of the resistance that she knows she will encounter from her controlling parents and plastic-surgeon fiancé, she’ll take a year off before returning to the Virology lab at Stanford and dedicate herself to a training regimen that will put her in the position to challenge Tommy Filbert for that Coney Island crown. As has always been the case with Cait, second best won’t do. If she does this, she’ll need to win it all.