Thursday, July 9, 2009

Moronathon 2009!

We recently held our 2nd annual Moronathon here in Amsterdam. The Moronathon is a series of ten semi-athletic and semi-sober events designed to test strength, endurance, and your (lack of) ego. To give you a quick idea of what it's about, here's a video of some of last year's event:



This year was another rousing success. We started things off with a little pre-party to get everyone in the right frame of mind before heading down to the park. You'll notice we had t-shirts made. The 'I amoron' is a play on the city's tourism campaign, "I amsterdam."

The Moronathon kicks off with the first event, where each man punts a football and then attempts to chase it down and catch it. Everybody gets 5 punts and the person who has traveled the farthest wins. We score on a point system, with 5 points for 1st place, 3 for second, and 1 for third.

The second event was a crabwalk relay with cups of beer at each end. Each contestant crabwalked four lengths, downing a total of 2 cans of beer. The event was scored for time, with penalties added for spilled beer.


The third event was a 3-man race bouncing on exercise balls, as seen in the video. This was actually a better event last year, when the field was muddy and everybody had a hard time controlling the ball.

A new event this year, completely ripped off from a little girl Brian and Rob saw in the park during Queens Day, was the launching of a Dutch chocolate-covered marshmallow snack into the air by means of jumping onto a board and attempting to catch the snack in your mouth. Contestants got three attempts, it was much harder than it looked and it was insanely fun.


The scariest event was the egg toss. Since there were morons involved, the object of this egg toss was not to keep the egg intact, but to hit your opponent with it. Each man carried three eggs, and after starting 30 paces apart, the combatants would decrease the distance between each other for the next throw. It got a little brutal, and once the event was over, devolved into an all out egg war.

The egg war was followed by the hanging competition. Each man hung from a tree branch while the rest bombarded him with the exercise balls. This was followed by a disastrous event where we tried to throw a tennis ball up in the air, drop and do a push up, and then catch the tennis ball. This is not easy to do, and only one guy managed to catch his tennis ball. We won't be doing that event again next year.

We then moved to the Rodeo event where contestants tried to balance on an exercise ball for time. This turned out to be hilarious to watch. The next to last event was dribbling a soccer ball backwards for time. This event was difficult, mostly due to the fact that we'd been drinking for several hours at that point.

The final event was a race. The endpoint of the race was announced and runners could take any path they chose to get to it. Some runners chose a longer, safer route, and the rest of us ran in a straight line, which just so happened to include a dirty canal. It was the perfect moronic ending to another great Moronathon. After the competition, everyone cleans up and gets together for a bbq and a presentation of the trophy, which is a wooden statue of a duck.


Rob has tons and tons of video and is working to splice together another movie for this year's event. Oh, and if you're wondering how well Rob did in the Moronathon this year, doesn't this picture say it all?