Yasir Salem
Competitive eater. Endurance athlete. Food obsessive. Marketing executive.
Yasir Salem is a New York-based competitive eater and endurance athlete. He has won 9 competitive eating contests, competed in 6 Nathan's Famous Fourth of July finals at Coney Island, and set a world record at the time by eating 47 ears of sweet corn in 12 minutes. Major League Eating ranked him #11 in the world in 2017.
He has finished 108 marathons and ultras, including 50 marathons in 50 states in one year and all six World Marathon Majors, plus 4 full Ironman triathlons and 410 miles in 24 hours at Bike Sebring.
Donut racing combined the two: Yasir is a 10-time Tour de Donut overall champion and 8-time Donut Derby champion. His work has been covered by Men's Health, Runner's World, Bicycling, ESPN, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, NPR and PBS.
Off the course he is a senior marketing executive in media, events and branded content, with experience at Hearst, The Economist, Business Insider, Young & Rubicam. He speaks Arabic and some Japanese and has traveled to more than 40 countries.
His late wife, Gweneviere Mann, passed away from lung cancer in 2018. He started the Gweneviere Mann Foundation in her memory to fund early detection for brain tumors and lung cancers, and months later set out to run a marathon in every state for it. He wrote about Gwen and the 50 states in a chapter of Chicken Soup for the Soul: Running for Good (2019), co-authored by Dean Karnazes. Why he ran 50.