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Eat & Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness Kindle Edition
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For nearly two decades, Scott Jurek has been a dominant force — and darling — in the grueling and growing sport of ultrarunning. He held the American 24-hour record and he was one of the elite runners profiled in the runaway bestseller Born to Run. In Eat and Run, Jurek opens up about his life and career as a champion athlete with a plant-based diet and inspires runners at every level.
From his Midwestern childhood hunting, fishing, and cooking for his meat-and-potatoes family to his slow transition to ultrarunning and veganism, Scott’s story shows the power of an iron will and blows apart the stereotypes of what athletes should eat to fuel optimal performance. Full of stories of competition as well as science and practical advice — including his own recipes — Eat and Run will motivate readers and expand their food horizons.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMariner Books
- Publication dateJune 5, 2012
- File size13803 KB
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"In pursuing the mental side of endurance, Jurek uncovers the most important secrets any runner can learn."
-- "Amby Burfoot, author of The Runner's Guide to the Meaning of Life"From the Inside Flap
In Eat and Run, Scott Jurek opens up about his life and career as an elite athlete and a vegan and inspires runners at every level. From his Midwestern childhood hunting, fishing, and cooking for his meat-and-potatoes family, to his early beginnings in running (he hated it), to his slow transition to ultrarunning and veganism, to his world-spanning, record-breaking races Scott s story shows the power of an iron will and blows apart all the stereotypes of what athletes should eat to fuel optimal performance. Chock full of incredible, on-the-brink stories of endurance and competition as well as fascinating science and accessible practical advice including his own favorite plant-based recipes Eat and Run will motivate everyone to go the distance, whether that means getting out for that first run, expanding their food horizons, or simply exploring the limits of their own potential.
From the Back Cover
What a triumph, both Scott Jurek s life and this one-of-a-kind book. I ve seen Jurek in action as he defies unimaginable challenges, and thanks to this breathtakingly personal account, I finally understand how he does it. He rebuilt himself literally from the inside out, and the result is a man and a story unlike any other. Christopher McDougall, author of Born to Run
The surprise here isn t that Scott Jurek knows a lot about nutrition. Or that he ran prodigious mileage. More impressively, we discover that Jurek studied many of the great philosophers and used their lessons to focus his running. In pursuing the mental side of endurance, Jurek uncovers the most important secrets any runner can learn. Amby Burfoot, author of The Runner s Guide to the Meaning of Life
About the Author
SCOTT JUREK is a world-renowned ultramarathon champion who trains and races on a vegan diet. He has prominently appeared in two New York Times bestsellers, Born to Run and The 4-Hour Body, and has been featured on CNN and in the New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other media. Known and admired for his earth-conscious lifestyle, Scott is also a highly sought after motivational speaker, physical therapist, coach, and chef. He has delivered talks to numerous organizations, including Microsoft, Starbucks, and the esteemed Entertainment Gathering. He lives in Boulder.
Steve Friedman is the author of Lost on Treasure Island, Driving Lessons, and The Agony of Victory and co-author of the New York Times bestseller Loose Balls. His work has appeared numerous times in The Best American Sports Writing. His website is stevefriedman.net.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Prologue
I was a shy kid with high blood pressure. I grew into a skinny adolescent whom other kids teased and called “Pee-Wee.” I wasn’t the fastest kid in my school, or the strongest, or even the smartest. I was common as grass, longing for something I couldn’t even name. I was like everyone else, the same. Then I found something.
I’m not going to offer any vague parables about inspiration and belief. I’m not going to promise you that if you want to achieve your dream, all you need is faith. No, I am going to show you—in concrete terms—how I transformed myself from the inside out and how you can do it too. Whether you’re a marathoner or weekend jogger, swimmer or cyclist, young or old, fit or fat, you can do this. I know because I did it.
The story of my life is going to sound very familiar. Not in the details (unless you’ve found yourself face down in Death Valley, that is), but in the desire. It’s the tale of everyone who has ever felt stuck, of anyone who has dreamed of doing more, of being more.
I was stuck like that a few years ago in one of the lowest, hottest spots on the planet. That’s where I’ll start my story. That’s where I’ll start your story.
1
Somebody
BADWATER ULTRAMARATHON,
DEATH VALLEY, CALIFORNIA, 2005
The best way out is always through.
—Robert Frost
My brain was on fire. My body was burning up. Death Valley had laid me out flat, and now it was cooking me. My crew was telling me to get up, that they knew I could go on, but I could barely hear them. I was too busy puking, then watching the stream of liquid evaporate in the circle of light from my headlamp almost as fast as it splashed down on the steaming pavement. It was an hour before midnight, 105 incinerating, soul-sucking degrees. This was supposed to be my time. This was the point in a race where I had made a career of locating hidden reservoirs of sheer will that others didn’t possess, discovering powers that propelled me to distances and speeds that others couldn’t match. But tonight, roasting on the pavement, all I could summon was the memory of a television commercial I had seen as a child. First there’s an egg in someone’s fingers and a voice says, “This is your brain.” Then the owner of the hand cracks the egg, and as it sizzles and crackles onto a hot skillet, the voice says, “And this is your brain on drugs.” I saw that image in the scorching nighttime sky. I heard the disembodied voice. But what I thought was: “This is my brain on Badwater.”
I had just run 70 miles through a place where others had died walking, and I had 65 more to go. I reminded myself that this was the point in the race where I was supposed to dust anyone foolish enough to have kept up with me in the first half. In fact, I had started this race intending to shatter its record never mind worry about winning it. And now I didn’t think I could finish.
There was only one answer: Get up and run. Whatever the problem in my life, the solution had always been the same: Keep going! My lungs might be screaming for oxygen, my muscles might be crying in agony, but I had always known the answer lay in my mind. Tired tendons had begged for rest in other places, my flesh had demanded relief, but I had been able to keep running because of my mind. But not now. What had gone wrong?
Running was what I did. Running was what I loved. Running was—to a large extent—who I was. In the sport I had chosen as avocation, career, obsession, and unerring but merciless teacher, running was how I answered any challenge.
Technically speaking, I was an ultramarathoner. So I competed in any foot race longer than the marathon distance of 26.2 miles. In point of fact, though, I had fashioned a career from running and winning races of at least 50 miles, most often 100, and every so often 135 and 150 miles. Some I had led from start to finish, others I had stayed comfortably back until the point when I needed to find another gear. So why was I on the side of the road vomiting, unable to go on?
Never mind my success. People had warned me that this race—this 135-mile jaunt through Death Valley—was too long and that I hadn’t given my body enough time to recover from my last race—a race I had won just two weeks earlier, the rugged and prestigious Western States 100 Mile. People had said that my diet—I had been eating only plant-based foods for seven years—would never sustain me. No one had voiced what I now suspected might be my real problem—that I had underestimated the race itself.
Some ultras curve through level virgin forest, next to melodious streams, past fields of wildflowers. Some ultras occur in the cool melancholy of autumn, others in the invigorating chill of early spring.
Then there were the ultras like the one that had felled me. Its proper name was the Badwater UltraMarathon. Competitors called it the Badwater 135, and a lot of people knew it as “the toughest foot race on earth.”
But I hadn’t taken such talk too seriously. I thought I had run more difficult courses. I thought I had faced much faster, tougher competition. I had raced in snow and rain, won events in far corners of the earth. I had scrambled up loose rock, over peaks of 14,000 feet. I had hopscotched down boulder fields, forded across icy streams. I was used to trails that caused deer to stumble and falter.
Sure, the Badwater flat-lined through Death Valley at the hottest time of the year. And yes, according to Badwater legend, one year when a shoe company handed out its product to all entrants, many of the soles supposedly melted on the scorching pavement.
But that was just a story, right? And though the Badwater did sizzle and though it was longer than I usually race, its brutality was unidimensional. I was used to forbidding terrain, climate, and competition. Other ultras inspire not just reverence but fear. The Badwater? The truth is, a lot of the most accomplished and well-known ultrarunners had never run it. Yeah, Death Valley made it sound ominous, if not fatal, but when you are in a zone running at levels one might call superhuman, tales of danger and death aren’t uncommon. Ultrarunners liked the stories but didn’t dwell on them. We couldn’t.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t prepared; in my line of work, lack of preparation was tantamount to self-abuse. I had purchased an industrial-sized sprayer so that I could be hosed down at regular intervals. I had worn specially designed heat-reflecting pants and shirt. I had guzzled 60 ounces of water (the equivalent of three bicycle bottles) every hour for the first 6 hours of the race. But those precautions were designed to shield my body. No industrial sprayer was going to protect my mind. And an ultrarunner’s mind is what matters more than anything.
Racing ultras requires absolute confidence tempered with intense humility. To be a champion, you have to believe that you can destroy your competition. But you also have to realize that winning requires total commitment, and a wavering of focus, a lack of drive, a single misstep, might lead to defeat or worse. Had I been too confident, not humble enough?
Early in the race, after 17 miles, a marine who had dropped out saluted me as I ran past him because he knew my reputation. Another runner, a desert race veteran, dropped out about 30 miles later, right about the time he realized his urine was flowing dark as coffee. He knew my reputation, too. But my reputation wasn’t helping me now. Neither was my earlier confidence.
The leader was a fifty-year-old ship pilot and cliff diver named Mike Sweeney, whose high dive training had included smacking himself on the head. Trailing him was a forty-eight-year-old Canadian baggage handler named Ferg Hawke, who was fond of quoting Friedrich Nietzsche.
Journalists in the running press called me “the Real Deal.” But was I? Or was I a fraud?
Moments of questioning come to us all. It is human nature to ask why we put ourselves in certain situations and why life places hurdles in our path. Only the most saintly and delusional among us welcomes all pain as challenge, perceives all loss as harsh blessing. I know that. I know that I’ve chosen a sport stuffed with long stretches of agony, that I belong to a small, eclectic community of men and women where status is calibrated precisely as a function of one’s ability to endure. Hallucinations and vomiting, to me and my fellow ultrarunners, are like grass stains to Little Leaguers. Chafing, black toenails, and dehydration are just the rites of passage for those of us who race 50 and 100 miles and more. A marathon is a peaceful prologue, a time to think and work out kinks. Ultrarunners often blister so badly they have to tear off toenails to relieve pressure. One ultrarunner had his surgically removed before a race, just in case, so he wouldn’t need to bother later on. Cramps don’t merit attention. Unless nearby lightning makes the hair on your arms and head stand up and dance, it’s nothing but scenery. Altitude headaches are as common as sweat and inspire approximately the same degree of concern (the death by brain aneurysm of one runner in a Colorado race notwithstanding). Aches are either ignored, embraced, or, for some, treated with ibuprofen, which can be risky. Combined with heavy sweating, too much ibuprofen can cause kidney failure, which usually results in ghostly pallor and, if you’re lucky, an airlift by helicopter to the nearest hospital. As an ultrarunner buddy and physician on...
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Product details
- ASIN : B005OCHOZS
- Publisher : Mariner Books (June 5, 2012)
- Publication date : June 5, 2012
- Language : English
- File size : 13803 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 273 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #234,246 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #62 in Running & Jogging (Kindle Store)
- #364 in Weight Maintenance Diets
- #394 in Weight Loss Diets (Kindle Store)
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About the authors
Scott Jurek is a world renowned ultramarathon champion and the 24-hour American record holder of 165.7 miles--6 1/2 marathons in one day. His wins include the Western States 100 Mile Endurance Run an unprecedented seven consecutive times, the 135 mile Badwater Ultramarathon twice, Hardrock Hundred and the 153 mile Spartathlon three times. He powers his body on a plant based diet and is a passionate cook, physical therapist and coach. Scott prominently appears in two New York Times Bestsellers "Born to Run" and "The 4-Hour Body." He has been featured in the The New York Times, CNN, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, EPSN Magazine and numerous other media. He makes his home near the mountains of Boulder, CO. For more information visit http://www.scottjurek.com.
Steve Friedman is the author of five books, including Driving Lessons, Lost on Treasure Island and The Agony of Victory and the co-author of two books. Eat & Run (with Scott Jurek), will be released June 5, 2012. Friedman has written for Esquire, GQ, Outside, The New York Times, Backpacker, Runner's World and other titles and his stories have been widely anthologized. He grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and graduated from Stanford University. He lives in New York City. Visit Stevefriedman.net.
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I appreciate the motivation that this book has provided and hope that it will help to make me a better person and runner.
He begins running as an adolescent in order to escape the pressures of his daily life and to condition himself for cross-country skiing. At first he hates running, but over time grows to love it and it becomes his main sport. He realizes that he becomes stronger the longer he runs, rather than the other way around.
Thus begins a career of ultrarunning - running distances over that oh-so-easy 26.2 miles (having never run more than a mile, I am being facetious.) Jurek has ran and won races that are over 100 miles on a regular basis.
Jurek became a vegan when he took up distance running seriously. At the end of each chapter, he features a training tip and a vegan recipe.
What I loved most, though, was the wisdom that Jurek imparts. He's clearly a very deep person who has learned a lot over his lifetime.
Some of my favorite quotes:
*What we eat is a matter of life and death. Food is who we are.
*Difficulty would help. It had always helped. I was finally figuring that out. All the whys in the universe hadn't granted me peace or given me answers.
*You could carry your burdens lightly or with great effort.
*Now we sit. We drive and surf on the internet and watch television. And naturally, we suffer.
*Whether you get what you want isn't what defines you. It's how you go about your business.
*We all lose sometimes. We fail to get what we want. Friends and loved ones leave. We make a decision we regret. We try our hardest and come up short. It's not the losing that defines us. It's how we lose. It's what we do afterward.
The only reason I've given it 4 over 5 stars is that there were times that the book felt very long. But overall, highly recommend.
An ultramarathon is a race any distance longer than the 26.2 miles of a marathon. Some common distances of these races are 50k (31 miles), 50 miles, 100k (62 miles), 100 miles and even further. As if the distances alone weren't daunting enough, some of these races are held in extreme environmental conditions such as the Western States 100 that traverses the Gold Rush trails of the California Sierra Nevada or the Badwater which is 135 miles through Death Valley.
It's one thing to complete these grueling exercises in masochism, but it's another to actually win them, and yet another to do it on a 100% plant based diet. Scott Jurek, author of "Eat and Run", is a vegan ultramarathon winner and his book recounts his adventures running ultra races all over the world and how he did it on a vegan diet.
An ultramarathon is about transcendence and requires metaphysical strength as opposed to athletic talent and has been described as 99% mental and 1% physical. Of interest to me was what Jurek had to say about how the sport attracts many recovering alcoholics and addicts. Study after study has shown that the runner's high comes from increased levels of endorphins and endocannabinoids.
Jurek says, "I'm convinced that a lot of people run ultramarathons for the same reason they take mood altering drugs...the longer and farther I ran, the more I realized that what I was often chasing was a state of mind - a place where worries that seemed monumental melted away, where the beauty and timelessness of the universe, of the present moment, came into sharp focus."
I also liked his four-step checklist to deal with a problem or disappointment: First, allow yourself to feel what you're feeling and acknowledge it. Second, take stock of the situation. Third, ask yourself what you can or cannot do to remedy the situation. Fourth, separate the negative thoughts from reality.
I'm deeply inspired by people like Scott Jurek. Not just because he's a winner, but because he lives his life by his own rules and he's made a living out of doing what he loves most. He shows us how to break out of our self-imposed limits and that growth only comes by transcending those limits.
Review Written By David Allan Reeves
Author of "Running Away From Me"