Adventures in Onionism

 I made a quick trip to Portland. I ate vegan donuts and ran in Forest Park, among other things. Good (too brief) times with old friends, Hiker Trash and other. Now I'm back in Oakland, which also has vegan donuts , although they are stupid expensive. We do have more trails than PDX though--I ran with a few people from Berkeley Running Club, which was pretty fun, and made me optimistic about having good ultra training partners this go-round of East Bay living. Here's a long distance trail that I'll probably never hike: the Great Plains Trail . I'll also probably never walk the length of the Keystone XL pipeline . But you never know.

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.

I just read Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals . At times I found Foer's writing extremely pretentious (e.g., five pages of "Influence/Speechlessness" repeated over and over, consisting of 21,000 letters, which is how many entire animals the average American eats in a lifetime.) But in general I thought it was well written and enjoyable. I think Foer assumes to some degree that the reader agrees with (or at least doesn't virulently oppose) three ideas: factory meat farming is (1) inefficient (it takes from 6 to 26 plant calories to make 1 meat calorie), (2) environmentally horrible ("All told, farmed animals in the United States produce 130 times as much waste as the human population--roughly 87,000 pounds of shit per second . The polluting strength of this shit is 160 times greater than raw municipal sewage.") and (3) extremely cruel (cages are so small animals can't turn around. Watch Meet Your Meat if you need convincing). A few chapters of th...

Scott Jurek is crazy, awesome, and vegan .