Switching to Vegan

Switching to Vegan

I love running. When I’m not running, I love to talk about running. One problem is finding people who want to listen to me talk about running. You would think that I would be able to talk about running with my fellow runners, but they also want to talk about running, not listen. There’s a saying: “How can you tell if someone has run a marathon?” The answer? “Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.” Interestingly, the same can be said of vegans: “How can you tell if someone is vegan?” “Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.” Coincidence? I think not.

I am passionate about two things that people tend to get very passionate about. I was a runner first. A long story for another day is that I ran my first half marathon because of a broken leg (like I said, it’s a long story.) I trained hard, and for five years, continued to bring my time down. But that elusive 2:00:00 half-marathon barrier refused to be broken. I did make it to 2:00:45. Yes, that’s missing my goal by 45 seconds. But to me, that is still… missing.  I wondered what else I could do. I couldn’t possibly train any harder. That’s when I read an article in Runner’s World magazine about Scott Jurek. That article made reference to Scott’s memoir, Eat & Run, published in 2012. (SEE http://www.scottjurek.com/).

Scott is a vegan ultramarathoner. That means that 26.2188 miles is not far enough for him to run at one time, he feels driven to exceed that distance. And he is very good at it. He, too, was searching for more performance when he switched to a vegan lifestyle. A passionate advocate for vegetarianism, he follows a 100% plant-based diet, which he credits for his endurance, recovery and consistent twenty year racing career. In Eat & Run, Scott opens up about his life and career — as an elite athlete and a vegan — and inspires runners at every level.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a nutritionist! The following paragraphs simply describe my own personal experience with plant-based eating. You can attempt to adopt such a diet if you wish, but you do so at your own risk.

For me, I noticed a few changes. Maybe it’s a placebo effect, but if it works, I’ll take it. The first thing I noticed is that about ten pounds just fell off of me. I hadn’t changed any exercise habits yet, so I attribute this to cutting out the meat.

I also noticed that I could run sooner after eating; as a carnivore I had to wait at least two hours, now I could – pun intended – Eat and Run! (Seriously, I just now thought of that pun!) I also noticed that after a run, fewer body parts were hurting. It seems as though I now recover more quickly and am able to run longer distances more often. On the medical side, after a few years I eventually noticed that my hereditarily-high total cholesterol number finally came down to that magical limit of “200”.

After five years of trying, I did smash my half-marathon PR multiple times. The most recent smashing was a few weeks ago I set my latest HM PR of 1:47:24 at the Delaware marathon Running Festival. That came only three weeks after nabbing a new marathon PR of 3:57:15. I’m still looking for that elusive BQ, though. 3:40 seems so far away. Plan B is to hang in there until I turn 60 and my BQ time increases to 3:55.

Thanks for letting me talk about running.

Until next time,

The Plant-Based Plodder