You have to get your buns in shape if you’re a champion hot dog eater — and Miki Sudo has her preparations down to a science.
“This is something I take seriously. There’s no playing around,” said Sudo, 30, a Manhattan native who has won Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest the last two years and is ready to fight for the title again on Monday.
Sudo works out in the gym at the W Hotel on Lexington Ave on June 30.Helayne SeidmanSudo is following a regimen more akin to an Olympic gamesman than a glutton for the annual July 4 contest in Coney Island: 2 ¹/₂ hours of daily cardio, a diet based on vegetables and lean protein, and about six hours of nightly sleep.
A competitive eater since 2013, Sudo said gorging hot dogs “challenge your capacity, your speed, your technique and coordination.”
And her winning hot dog technique? “Bite, bite, sever and swallow.”
Sudo, who currently resides in Las Vegas, grew up in Hawaii, and as a young girl regularly built up a “large appetite” surfing, swimming, kayaking and boogie boarding.
She enjoyed hitting fast food joints when she was done with her exercise.
“We would just come back from the beach, and they would have 39 cent hamburger Mondays and 49 cent cheeseburger Tuesdays,” she said.
“We would just buy a whole bunch and gorge like that. I felt like my appetite was correlated to my activity level. I didn’t realize it was connected to a ‘thing.’”
Her strange talent helped her win the female division of the Nathan’s contest in 2014 and 2015, in just her second and third years as a competitive eater. In the 2015 Nathan’s contest, she scarfed down 38 dogs in 10 minutes.
Sudo (L) poses with competitor Michelle Lesco during the official weigh-in ceremony on July 1.Reuters“As the contest approaches, I get in the gym every day,” she said. She spends a lot of time on a treadmill, which she sets at an incline of 15 percent — “the max.”
“I go at about 3.6 to 4.2 kilometers per hour..It’s just like a brisk walk, so that I’m sweating, my heart rate is elevated. I don’t like anything high impact.”
Exercise is “more important than practicing with food, than training with liquids. I can eat more when I’m not carrying the extra weight.”
Even though she sometimes eats like a pig, at 5-foot-7 and 135 pounds, she’s as slim and athletic as a gazelle.
Sudo won the Nathan’s crown in 2014 by unseating Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas, who won the women’s division contest in its first three years, starting in 2011.
But Sudo won’t trash talk her rival.
She said: “I don’t want to have to eat my words if things go awry.”
