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 | Fit for life, Harvey and Marilyn Diamond, Warner books, 1987The book is about eating the food your body needs when it needs it and how it needs it. |
 | Fit for life 2, Harvey and Marilyn Diamond, Warner Books, 1989 |
 | In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, Michael Pollan, Penguin Press HC, 2008 |
 | The organic foods sourcebook, Elaine Lipson, McGraw-Hill, 2001 |
 | The New Becoming Vegetarian: The Essential Guide To A Healthy Vegetarian Diet, Vesanto Melina, Brenda Davis, Healthy Living Publications, 2003 |
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| High Performance Vegetarians |
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| Written by Richard | ||||||||||
| Tuesday, 20 July 2010 03:52 | ||||||||||
 Many people could not conceive that a vegetarian diet is a high performance one, yet there are many athletes in today’s most challenging sports that have chosen a vegetarian diet.The most famous vegetarian runner is, of course, Carl Lewis. He wrote in the book, Very Vegetarian, that “my best year of track competition was the first year I ate a vegan diet.” Carl’s point was that he didn’t require animal proteins to perform to the highest standards in the world, winning multiple gold medals at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.
Another leading runner who follows a vegan regime is Scott Jurek, the American ultrarunner. Scott performs in ultra-marathons, gruelling races that can be as long as 100 miles. In order to maximize his performance, he began studying the diets of traditional running people throughout the world.
Jurek found that many of these people ate a vegetarian diet. Take, for example, the Marathon Monks from Japan, who ran an ultra-marathon every day and existed on tofu and vegetables. This convinced Scott to remove gradually both meat and dairy from his diet. You may wonder if this effected his performance? It did, he continued to compete in and win ultra-marathons.
In an article with the Vegetarian Times, he responds to how being a vegan effects his performance as a runner:
I noticed changes in my body's ability to bounce back after hard workouts. Following a vegan diet got me eating more whole foods, and because of that, my muscles don't get as sore and tired. I can complete my workouts and also do back-to-back days, which are important with ultramarathoning: I work out hard two days in a row to simulate what it's like to be at the 80th mile of a 100-mile race. I've spoken to fellow vegetarians who went back to eating meat because they felt like they weren't as strong. But many people just don't take in enough calories and variety of foods. Or they get fed negativity from coaches or fellow athletes. It's important that there are athletes like myself out there saying, "You can do this and you can do it right."
The take away from these two great athletes is that a vegan diet is no barrier to success in a high performance sporting arena. If Scott and Carl can succeed on a vegan diet, so can you!
Vegetarian Running Resources: http://www.nomeatathlete.com/ http://www.vegetarianrunner.com/ Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lululemonathletica/2903077168 For more insight into this topic, see these articles:
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| Last Updated on Tuesday, 20 July 2010 04:21 |
