new york times
Scott Jurek, 36 is an accomplished ultramarathoner and disciplined vegan. There are other professional athletes who do not eat meat: Milwaukee Brewers first baseman Prince Fielder, a vegetarian, may be the best known, and the hockey player Georges Laraque is also a vegan. But it is difficult for some to comprehend how this lifestyle is compatible with training weeks of 140 miles and more, “easy” runs of 40 miles and interval training that includes uphill three-mile repeats, all culminating in races that are often 100 miles or more, sometimes through deserts or frozen wastelands or up and down mountains.
new york times
Jurek is certainly not small or rail- thin, his whole issue is getting enough calories. He eats 5,000-8,000 calories a day and “I get that all from plant sources,” he says.
He didn’t grow up vegan, but in college his diet began to improve and he saw how much disease is lifestyle related. He says he began to eat “real food, the way people have been eating for thousands of years.”
“None of this is weird,” he says. “If you go back 300 or 400 years, meat was reserved for special occasions, and those people were working hard. Remember, almost every long-distance runner turns into a vegan while they’re racing, anyway — you can’t digest fat or protein very well.”
In 1999, Jurek ran his first Western States 100, this is an up-and-down course in the Sierra Nevada with a cutoff time of 30 hours. He set the course record in 2004, 15 hours 36 minutes; won the race seven consecutive times; and in 2005, two weeks after finishing, ran and won the Badwater Ultramarathon, a 135-mile race that begins in Death Valley and ends halfway up Mount Whitney.
Clearly, his diet isn’t slowing him down.
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