Adventures in Onionism

It's Tuesday, I'm back in Berkeley, and I just ran my first Hardrock last Friday/Saturday in 34:42. I wanted to record thoughts immediately after the experience, because it was hard , and now that it's been a few days, I'm already forgetting the pain. [I don't want kids, so you'll have to insert your own reference to childbearing here if you so desire.] Start The race started at 6AM. I slept reasonably well the night before in my truck just behind the school gym where the race starts--Silverton is very low key, so it's easy to dirtbag inside the city limits. I did, however, have a bit of GI non-normality, but it didn't seem like a big deal. I started in shorts, T-shirt, and a windshirt. As expected, the windshirt soon became too warm, likely because of the clouds that were obviously going to bring rain sooner rather than later. First Climb I started maybe 30-40 deep in the field, going faster than I'd ever climbed in training, but not feel...

Just finished reading Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness by Scott Jurek (with Steve Friedman). While I'm happy that the book has motivated me to run a little (lot) more consistently, I mostly didn't like it, for two reasons. One, the writing was tired and cliched. Two, there were too many pseudo-scientific and psuedo-spiritual claims about the source of his running prowess (e.g. homeopathy, cleansing toxins, etc.). For good measure they mentioned one of the many horrible statistical studies showing that sitting makes people die early (tangent you've heard before: just because you control for smoking and other aspects of lifestyle doesn't mean you get at causality. If there is anything in the world that you did not include in your analysis that is correlated with both sitting and life expectancy, then your estimate of the effect of sitting on life expectancy is incorrect. And if there are plenty of things that you can measure that are correlated ...

This time at Runner's World on his vegan diet. I don't know that I buy the causality about better performance and fewer injuries, but I definitely believe he's right that it's perfectly healthy, and that athletes can absolutely get enough vegan protein. Just eat real food.

The writing's not amazing, but the sentiments are. An excerpt from Scott Jurek's forthcoming book .

Read this article about Scott Jurek from the April Runner's World that just became available on-line. It is a huge downer. It is also by the same author as a very similar and ridiculous article about a friend of mine. I'm curious if you find the Jurek article inspiring. Not me. I think everybody has skeletons in their closet or has had crappy things happen to them, but I think it's highly unlikely that Scott Jurek is anywhere near as gloomy as he's made to appear in this article. Compare this article to Born to Run , which I loved, and I thought portrayed him in an accurate and positive light. Jurek probably does occasionally wonder if his running is a selfish pursuit or wonder if he's a hypocrite for flying so much while preaching a low-impact life, but that just makes him a thoughtful and caring person, and even if his running career were over (which it's not) there's something about the author's style and portrayal that I very much dislike.