The no meat athlete

Those that know me know that I am someone who will always seek out new ways of improving my health and of helping with my running and other sports. While my experiments using different techniques and gear etc will be covered in future posts, I thought I would expand abit more on the role of nutrition in our running.

I was speaking to a couple of runners in the local groups that I know in Australia last year and a few of them mentioned that they seemed to be running much easier and quicker once they had eliminated meat (or at least cut back severely) from their daily diets. There was also the customary references to also giving up alcohol and taking up the drinking of more anti-oxidant rich teas like green tea and also rooibos tea.

For those not familiar with rooibos (pronounced ‘Roy boss’), it is a tea grown from bushes that originate in Southern Africa. It is also the tea that contains the most anti-oxidants of all the teas on the planet. Drunk at night prior to bed it has a profound calming effect on one and is often given to young children in Southern Africa to ensure they have a good night’s rest. This calming effect I believe is due to it being naturally caffeine free. I do recommend that those that have not tried it do so at some stage.

Back to the notion of not consuming meat then. I was raised in South Africa, where (as in Australia) meat and red meat in particular was an important part of our diet. My parents had always instilled in us that at meal times it was imperative that we finish our meat first and foremost. Veggies were to be eaten if you had the room for them, but the meat was the most important aspect (this I suppose is because it was the most expensive part of the meal). I don’t recall a single night that went by as kids where our family did not eat some kind of meat. Even my athletics and rugby coaches at school pushed the fact that we would become weak if we did not eat meat.

Naturally meat has always been associated with decadence and a celebration of our power over the rest of the animal kingdom. However the bulk that results from a meat rich diet is not necessarily to the liking of all runners and sports people.

Through my research and reading it fascinated me to learn that some of the best runners on the planet consume either no meat or hardly any meat at all. Here I speak of the East Africans, who we all know to be consistently the best runners from 800m up to the marathon distance.

The Turahumara (or running people) of Mexico are also heavily reliant on vegetables, seeds and roots as part of their diet. This fact has not put a damper on their ability to cover 100 miles or more in one day. In fact during the 90’s these runners from Mexico – with no coach, no training plan and no dietician were beating the best ultra runners that the west had to offer in the renowned Leadville 100 mile endurance race. Those readers that have taken part in the race will know how tough and unforgiving it can be on the body.

Finally the Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei (shown in this video) are also well known to complete their marathons of up to 80km a day for 100 days or longer over a 7 year religious pilgrimage. They survive exclusively on a vegetarian diet and in some parts of their journey they fast completely and also take no rest, such that they are either running or meditating round the clock. This is truly phenomenal and something that western science can’t explain. For the amount of food that they take in, they should be dead by the end of their pilgrimage, yet they show little evidence of weight loss.

Perhaps then it may be a good idea to try and encompass some of these ideas into our diets to improve not only our running experience but also our lives in general. One individual who I came across in highlighted in his own website No Meat Athlete. He outlines how his times for the marathon dropped substantially once on the veggies until he qualified for Boston and is now seeking out new horizons.

With Scott Jurek another of the more well known ultra runners who is completely vegan these days, I can see no harm in trying some of these ideas myself. – Sean Muller