Arrange the bread-eating race! A roundup of fun, exciting, and hilarious ideas
The bread-eating race has long been a classic and popular event at sports festivals.
It’s a unique competition where bread is hung along the course, and participants bite it with no hands and run to the finish line.
If you’re going to do it, why not add your own twist to make it even more exciting? To meet that need, this article introduces variations on the bread-eating race.
We’ve gathered ideas from three perspectives: rule modifications, ways to hang the bread, and even ideas for hanging items other than bread.
Please use them as a reference.
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Arrangement of rules (1–10)
While two people hold hands in pairs
For something as simple and gimmick-free as a bread-eating race, it turns out to be surprisingly difficult once you try it, and there’s something oddly exciting about food showing up in a sporting event.
In this version, participants hold hands in pairs, so the key is how well the two can synchronize.
Unlike moving freely on your own, you have to go for the bread while taking your partner’s movements into account.
Aiming for the bread hanging from a string is trickier than it looks, so give it a try!
pick up with disposable chopsticks
The most traditional and common bread-eating race involves grabbing a suspended sweet bun (like an anpan) with your mouth, but there are hygiene concerns.
And if you put the bread in a plastic bag, then biting it directly becomes an issue too.
This version solves that problem while increasing the difficulty: try grabbing the bread with chopsticks.
It’s hard to catch a swaying piece of bread with chopsticks, but watch its movement closely and give it a try.
headgear; a costume headpiece or mask (e.g., a character/mascot head)
The bread-eating race, a familiar event at school sports days, is a popular competition, and with just one extra twist it can become even more fun.
Here, we introduce a method where participants wear some kind of costume headgear that makes it harder to eat the bread.
Headpieces like bear or panda masks, which leave little of the mouth exposed, are especially recommended.
That said, exaggerated glasses or wigs that drastically change one’s appearance can also draw laughs.
Adding the extra step of putting on headgear makes it more entertaining for the spectators as well.
Arrangement of Rules (11–20)
Three-legged race
A simple twist is to do a bread-eating race as a three-legged race.
Even in a regular three-legged race, simply running requires a sense of teamwork, but when you have to grab the hanging bread, even better communication is needed.
Coordinating your jump timing and calling out to each other will bring you closer to victory.
It sounds fun enough with a rule where only one person needs to grab the bread, but if the rule requires both teammates to get bread, the difficulty goes up and it becomes even more exciting to take on the challenge.
You get a high score if you take the large bread.
Since it’s a rare chance to hold a bread-eating race, it would be more fun with some twists, right? For example, how about a new rule where you prepare several sizes of bread—from bite-sized pieces to ones as big as a face—and the official ranking is decided by both the size of the bread you eat and your finish order.
Not knowing the final standings until the very end is part of the appeal.
Cheering with bated breath and pounding hearts all the way through would make it even more exciting.
You can’t move on until you eat it all right there.
When you think of the bread-carrying race, the iconic image is people running with bread clenched in their mouths without using their hands.
But here’s a twist that turns that on its head: you can’t head for the finish line until you’ve eaten all the bread.
What kind of bread you’ll get is part of the fun—you only find out after the start.
If it’s sliced sandwich bread… finishing it plain, with no butter and no drink, could be a bit tough.
If it’s a large sweet bun? It’ll probably taste better than plain bread, but it might take longer to finish.
The suspense of not knowing what bread you’ll get will have everyone running on edge—sure to make it even more exciting than the usual bread-carrying race!
Hanging method variations (1–10)
Reduce the number of breads
An easy way to make the classic bread-eating race more exciting is to reduce the number of breads.
With fewer loaves hanging, everyone tries their hardest from the start to make sure they don’t miss their chance, so the competition is guaranteed to heat up! Making it so there’s only one bread is a unique and fun twist, too, so if you’re bored with the usual bread-eating race, why not give this a try?