Before the weigh-in, Chris Steinbaugh '05 chugged three liters of water.
"Then I got on the scale, got off the scale and vomited," Steinbaugh said. "And it was an instant three pounds that I lost."
Steinbaugh wasn't cutting weight for wrestling or testing his stomach's capacity for pitcher-chugs. Rather, this senior was using his gag reflex in the name of a far worthier cause: a "Survivor"-style competition that Steinbaugh and 15 other thesis-avoiding seniors have orchestrated over the past several weeks.
Divided into two eight-person teams, the seniors have competed in weekly challenges, ranging from Stairmaster races to Trivial Pursuit face-offs. Each week, the losing team in the contest must vote off a member.
As part of the "weight fluctuation" challenge, participants competed to achieve the greatest weight gain or loss as a percentage of their total body weight in a 12-hour period.
And Steinbaugh wasn't the only one who showed devotion to his team.
"I didn't go to the bathroom that day," confessed opposing team member Hugh Meighen '05, who opted for the alternate "weight-gain" strategy.
But fellow team member Beau Harbour '05 sacrificed the most for the cause. "When I decided to gain, I decided to go all out," Harbour said.
The day before the weigh-in, Harbour had a small lunch around noon and didn't eat or drink anything for the rest of the day.
The next morning, Harbour recalled, "I woke up an hour before the 9 a.m. weigh-in, and rode the bike in Stephens for about 50 minutes wearing two hoodies, two pairs of sweatpants [and] a stocking cap."
After a successful weigh-in of 10 pounds below his normal body weight, Harbour spent "the rest of the day eating as much heavy food as I could."
"In 12 hours, I ate four meals, drank as much Gatorade as possible and clearly avoided caffeine," he said.
The eating spree paid off. When Harbour stepped on the scale 12 hours after his initial weigh-in, he had gained more than 11 percent of his body weight — and helped lead his team to victory.
Thanks in part to that gastrointestinal triumph, Harbour's "Team Hatchet" — named after Richard Hatch, the winner of "Survivor: Season 1" — currently leads opposing "Team Brunger" — named for fallen team member John Brunger '05, the first senior to be eliminated from the competition.
The game, however, is far from over.
In three weeks, when only nine seniors remain, the teams will merge — and, as Matt Berner '05 predicted, the competition will reach a fever pitch.
"At that point, it will become an everyman-for-himself melee, where if you win, you get immunity," he said.
As in the television series, the victor of "Survivor: Princeton" will walk away with a cash prize — though substantially less than the cool $1 million Hatch received from CBS.
"All the participants chipped in $25 at the beginning, so the winner takes home $400," Berner said.
The concept
Team Brunger member and former 'Prince' news editor Andrew Bosse '05 was quick to take credit for the elaborate competition.
"Everyone is going to claim they thought of it, but yeah, this was my idea," he said.
After discussing the concept with members of his draw group, he and his friends approached senior Stephanie Amann about making the game coed.
"We were all stressed about [our] theses and the end of the year, and about how we were going to make sure we saw our friends enough," Amann said.
She quickly convinced her female friends to get involved. Greg Callahan '05 eventually agreed to serve as the game's Jeff Probst — judging the competitions and tallying the emailed votes.
Thus — in the words of Harbour — " 'Princeton Survivor' was born."
Over the past few weeks, the competitors have certainly seen a lot of each other. "I've actually made more friends through [the 'Survivor' challenge] because I didn't know the boys as well, and I know them all really well now," said Tessa Marmion '05, a Team Brunger front-runner.
But not everyone in the competition is in it to make friends.
"I'm not gonna lie; I'm doing it for the money," Meighen said.
And he isn't too concerned about who he might offend along the way.
"I'm not playing to keep friends. I'm playing for $400 and I'll patch things up later," he admitted. "I'm not anticipating serious rifts, but I'm not anticipating being a chump either . . . Everyone's going for all the marbles here. $400, you know? I could buy a new bike with that."
Meighen isn't the only one taking the game seriously. As the competition heats up, many of the remaining 11 seniors have devised complex alliance strategies that rival those of real-life "Survivor" participants.
"Our team had more of a gender-oriented alliance, where as soon as we got one boy off, we could vote off all the rest of the boys," explained Stephanie Metcalf '05, a former member of Team Brunger.
Metcalf was therefore unconcerned by her less-than-stellar performance in the weight-fluctuation challenge. "I tried to lose weight and I gained 2 pounds," she recalls, "but it didn't matter because we had our gender alliance."
But Metcalf eventually sacrificed the alliance for the sake of her thesis, pulling a stunning "Survivor-suicide" by requesting that her team vote her off.
The move has shaken things up substantially on Team Brunger.
"She was a crucial part of my alliance," lamented former female ally Dunham Townend '05, "so now I'm left trying to mend my fences a little bit, especially as we merge teams next week."
Meighen offered a harsh analysis of Team Brunger's divisiveness. "I think their team is essentially dysfunctional at its core," he said. "It has the completely wrong attitude and you know, that's reflected in the results — we have more team members than they do. We'll see how things change when we all merge together, but they could learn a thing or two from the way our team's working."
Even Team Brunger-member Bosse agreed with Meighen's assessment.
"Right now, Team Hatchet has its stuff together," he said. "I mean they have theme shirts . . . and when you're making shirts for your team, it obviously shows a different level of commitment. Also, we have an unfortunate name, which doesn't really inspire people, so right now I have to give them the advantage," he said.
Place your bets
The game remains too close to call, with six Team Hatchet members and five Team Brunger members remaining. Team Hatchet scored a key victory on the "wine challenge," in which teams were required to purchase eight different containers of the cheapest wine they could find. (According to Berner, Arkansas-native Ann Glotzbach '05 "singlehandedly won the wine challenge for us, [since] she found wine in Arkansas for 54 cents a bottle.")
Hatchet also dominated the weight-fluctuation competition and eked out a close victory in the Dillon Fitness challenge. But Team Brunger did emerge triumphant in the nail-bitingly-close Trivial Pursuit and Crossword Puzzle challenges, causing Steinbaugh to conclude that, "mentally we're much smarter than they are — that's clear at this point."
But the "Survivor" winner is far from clear. Top picks include Meighen ("a wily one"), Glotzbach ("too nice to vote off") and Marmion ("a tough competitor").
But currently, participants are less concerned about making it to the end than they are about the task at hand — the "egg challenge." This week's contest requires players to carry around their egg with them at all times — ready to be "challenged" by opposing team members — and the team with the most eggs remaining at the end of week wins.
"I mean, really, protection is what it's all about," said Bosse — in reference to his egg, of course.
But Meighen presents a more complex assessment of this current contest: "The problem with this challenge is that everything can be going well for a while, but then it can change in a split-second, and that's going be devastating for the other team."
It certainly proved devastating for Townend. "Because of the fascist food rules at Marquand, I had to leave my egg, in its protective coffee mug, outside on the food and drink shelf," she explained. Late for lunch, Townend ran out of the library forgetting to retrieve her precious cargo — a costly mistake.
For when Meighen challenged Townend later in the day, she was empty-handed. "Kind of a pathetic way to get out, but fitting, I guess, for a Marquand nerd," she said.
Egg and Trivial Pursuit challenges are one thing; actually making it in the Outback is another.
Few of the seniors would consider partaking in the real "Survivor" challenge.
"I did Community Action instead of Outdoor Action because I really just wanted to have a bathroom and a shower," Val Smith '05 said, "so I think that would kind of preclude me . . . from participating in the real 'Survivor.'"
Steinbaugh concurred. "I'm already in a fishbowl in the Ivy community for doing this," he said. "I don't think I could stand a national TV audience."
Glotzbach, however, is less convinced. "I think I would hate being on the real 'Survivor' — but if I don't have a job by June, maybe . . . "
Ultimately, the seniors say, the "Survivor" challenge has offered a much-needed escape from job searches, theses and fears of graduation.
Most involved would agree with Harbour's assessment that "if I got voted off tomorrow, I would still look back fondly on this aspect of my senior spring."
Well, maybe not Meighen. He really wants that bike.
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