My guest today went from hating running to completing ultramarathons. So I figured, maybe
I could change heart as well.
Okay, If Matt can do it, so can I.
Hi it’s Emily from Bite Size Vegan and welcome to another vegan nugget. Matt Frazier is the
founder of the virally popular blog No Meat Athlete, which he founded in 2009 at about
the same time he went vegetarian.
He’s also the author of the book, No Meat Athlete: Run on Plants and Discover Your Fittest,
Fastest, Happiest, Self.
So with all this personal expertise in endurance sports and the experience of many a vegan
athlete to grace his blog and podcast, I thought Matt would be the perfect person to ask how
to eat vegan for endurance.
Thank you Matt so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to be here on the
channel and share a little bit of your journey with us.
Sure, it’s a pleasure Emily. Thanks for having me.
Alright, as a...I mean, you’re a vegan and you’re an endurance athlete. Could
you talk a little bit about how you got here? When and how you went vegan and a little bit
about your athletic history?
Yes absolutely. So, this all, the move...at least the dietary journey for me began about
6 years ago. I didn’t even know what vegan was but I ethically felt this urge to become
vegetarian. That happened to be near the end of another journey I was on, which was the
journey to qualify for the Boston Marathon. I had not been around, I hated it as a kid
but kind of picked it up on a whim in college with some friends. We just kind of, competitively
said ‘hey, let’s go. We can do a marathon. Let’s do it’. And I tried, it didn’t
go too terribly well. It took me almost 5 hours but I got really hooked on the idea
of qualifying for Boston. Because that was my initial goal, and I missed it by 100 minutes
in that first marathon because it took a 3 hour and 10 minute marathon to get into Boston.
But I became, I just thought...I have to do this, so I started working on it. Spent 6
years, like I said, doing that and right around the time I kind of plateaued, and started
to think ‘this might not happen’. I was 10 minutes away from getting to Boston and
at that point, 10 minutes seemed like an eternity to me because I had taken off so much time,
and felt like I was at the peak of my potential. So, I said ‘you know, I think I might not
get there. I’m just gonna eat the way I think I should be eating’. As far as ethics
go and how I feel right about eating, and I didn’t expect much at all. I thought it
might make the training difficult but it turned out that it worked really really well. And
within 6 months of making that dietary change, just the vegetarian, not yet vegan, I took
the last 10 minutes off my marathon, and qualified for Boston. So, that’s kind of where it
began then I had started my blog No Meat Athlete right when I went vegetarian to document the
experiment really, and just write about how it was. But in the process a lot of people
got into it, and I turned up, and met a lot of people who were already doing this sort
of thing who were...they were already vegan athletes that I didn’t really know about.
So, as I started to learn more about what they were doing, and being exposed more to the ethical
side of why go vegan, and not just vegetarian. I gradually made that transition, then about
4 years ago said ‘no more dairy’ and that was really it. So, since then I’ve gotten
into ultra running and done a couple of 50 milers, and a 100 miler, and more recently
I’ve gone back towards marathon training, and I’m thinking about trying to run a fast marathon again.
Alright, that is incredibly impressive. I’m always in awe of people who run because
it’s something I’ve never been able to physically accomplish.
It’s not that hard. I mean, I hated it too. I was awful at it. You put in the
time, put in the training at a really slow pace. Like, you’re comfortable most
of the time. That’s a huge key. Don’t be uncomfortable.
Oh, well then I did it wrong.
[laughs] Maybe
Can you speak a little bit too...about how to eat vegan for endurance
training specifically? Like is there a particular type of food that you eat or times that you
eat? When you’re trying to train for endurance, whether it’s running or other sports because
I know that you’ve interviewed a wide array of different athletes. So, I guess just kind
of speak to eating for...endurance of any kind.
Yeah, I mean there a lot of ways to do it, even within vegan. There are people
who are fruitarian and I don’t know if you or the audience knows about that, but they
eat entirely raw fruits and vegetables. 80/10/10 diets, so it’s 80% carbohydrate, 10% protein,
and 10% fat, and very very low in those other macro nutrients. And some of those people
do extremely well in endurance sports, including 100 miles. Then you see paleo type athletes
who are eating much higher protein, much higher fat. You see them doing well in sports too.
So, I really...within vegan even, I think you can do a lot of different things. The
traditional way to train for endurance sports or to eat for endurance sports, and it works
perfectly well for vegans, which is one reason why you do see a lot of vegan endurance athletes
is to get about 65% of your calories from carbohydrate. Something like 12-15% from protein
and then the rest from fat. So, it’s really not that different from, you know, if you
open up a vegan cookbook just off the shelf from a bookstore and look at the recipes,
they’re probably pretty well suited. They probably fit those ratios pretty closely because
a little bit lower in protein than a typical american diet and somewhat lower in fat usually, and
high in carbohydrate. The key of course is to make sure that those carbohydrates are quality
carbohydrates. And it’s okay to have some simple. It’s okay to have some sugars in
there, particularly fruits, whole fruits. Around workouts is a great time to even get
the simpler, more processed sugars. Like immediately after a workout is when I’ll drink some
fruit juice. Or even something like a white rice, or something starchy because you want
that carbohydrate to get immediately into your bloodstream and help you recover from
the workout. So, it’s a lot of carbohydrates but really nothing that out of the ordinary
from what I think most vegans eat. So, a typical meal in my house would be some kind
of pasta dish. Maybe with regular whole wheat pasta. Maybe with quinoa pasta. Usually some
kind of beans in the sauce. Maybe a pesto. Recently I stopped eating oil but until recently
that was typical, just have some oil in there. Um, you know a smoothy, salads. I found...I
really think this was the key. I don’t think it was...the reason I got faster when I first
went vegetarian, I don’t think it was that I eliminated the animal products from my diet.
I think it was more that I was totally ignoring fruits and vegetables. Like I had known the
carbohydrate, protein, fat ratios and I made sure that I hit those because I was...I was
really careful about nutrition. But I was leaving the vegetables, and the fruits, and
like these living foods off the plate. I was eating chicken breasts and brown rice, and
that was it most times. So, once I brought in all these fresh, you know, this whole fruits
and vegetables, all the different micronutrients in those. I think that made the real difference.
So, I make sure to keep that stuff really high in my diet even though it’s hard to
measure that. You don’t...you don’t see that when you look at nutrition facts. You
don’t see all that stuff but it’s really important. I think it’s crucial for recoveries
so that’s a big part of my diet.
So, I know you spoke a little bit at the beginning about how your times changed
drastically when you training for a marathon. Do you have any...specific, like here was
my time before I dropped meat and then maybe here’s my time after I dropped even dairy?
Or was it kind of more just a general feel that you had when you changed your diet through your training?
So, I was a...had like a 320 marathon before I went vegetarian and I felt that was
kind of the best I could do. I didn’t have a lot of hope for getting faster. I mean certainly
I still hoped that I could, thought optimistically, maybe I could. But when I went vegetarian
it was 6 months between those 2 marathons. That 320 and my 310 marathon that got me into Boston.
So, that 10 minute difference at that point when you kind of already reached that
close to what is sort of your potential is a pretty dramatic difference. And I think...
...one of the big reasons, besides as a result of all those micronutrients, is that I think
it let me recover faster. If you talked to any pro vegan athlete or an elite vegan athlete
who chooses this diet because of what it does for the performance reasons, they will say
‘they do it because it's the recovery’. They say ‘they can recover faster and as
a result get more workouts in, in a given week than the competition can’. Well for
me, someone who’s not competitive, but more just kind of recreational, competing against
my own times. Like a 310 marathon is gonna be an hour slower than the people who are
winning marathons, so it’s not like an elite time. So for me I think faster recovery...like
I’m not trying to get in 8 workouts in a week, right? I’m still gonna get the same
4 or 5, or whatever workouts amount in a week but now when I come back from a workout I’m
in better shape to do that workout than I would be otherwise. And what that means is
less injuries because if you’re showing up for the workout when you’re not fully
recovered then you’re kind of asking for injury as that lack of recovery accumulates
workout after workout. Soon enough, your body is going to break down and something is gonna
go wrong. So, that’s been the major thing for me is since I’ve started eating this
way, particularly since I’ve started eating vegan, I had almost no injuries whatsoever.
When I tried to do 2 marathons within 3 months before I would get injured but when I did
my 100 miler a couple of summers ago I had to do...the 100 mile of course was the final
thing, but a month before that I had to do a 50 mile, and a couple of weeks before that,
I had to do a 30 miler. That amount of running would have been unthinkable for me before.
A large part of that has to do with the diet.
So, for people who want to find out more about what you’re doing and information
you can provide, can you tell us where to find you?
Sure, pretty much everything I have is at NoMeatAthlete.com. I also have
a book that’s available on Amazon or Barnes & Noble called ‘No Meat Athlete’. I’m
at No Meat Athlete on twitter, and No Meat Athlete on facebook. And we have a bunch of
running groups around the country, and even some around the world. So, if you go to NoMeatAthlete.com/groups
you’ll see a listing of all the groups that we have and a good number of those groups
are active, and do a run every single week. So, in your area you might be able to find
some people who eat like you do and like running as well, so...check it out.
Great. Again, I just wanted to thank you so much for your time and for the advocacy
that you do with showing what’s possible on plants.
Sure, my pleasure. Thank you very much.
I hope you enjoyed hearing from Matt on eating vegan for endurance. This video was sponsored
in part by Cronometer where you can track your fitness and nutrition to ensure optimal
athletic performance whether busting out ultramarathons like Matt or lifting heavy. Use the link in
the video description or right there to make your own free profile.
Now, I’d love to hear your thoughts on Matt’s advice and experience. Are you an avid runner
or are you a disaster like myself? Let me know in the comments!
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