Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness by Scott Jurek, Steve Friedman Page A

Chinese or Mexican restaurants, usually run by Midwesterners. In Seattle, though, there was Japanese, Ethiopian, Indian, and just about everything else. Back in Minnesota I had hidden my brown rice before ski race meets to avoid ridicule, but in the Northwest, it was the carnivores who weren’t cool.
    I absorbed the culture there—the notion of leaving a small footprint, of living low on the land. My grandparents had actually lived that way, with their gardens and the way they killed the vast majority of the meat they ate. I wanted to live that way, too.
    I hung out with South Africans and New Zealanders at the hostel, and they told me about couscous curry and peanut stew. On the ferry I met a guy doing his physician assistant internship, and he introduced me to polenta. I read more of Doctor Weil. On the ferry, I would plug in my earphones and listen to audiobooks that talked about the connection between heart disease and a diet high in animal fat and low in vitamins and minerals.
    By the time I drove back to Duluth that fall, I was almost completely a vegetarian. But not quite. I stopped three times at McDonald’s for chicken sandwiches and a few sausage-egg biscuits. What can I say? I was hungry.
    I stopped long enough in Duluth to pack my bags and write my thesis, and then, in April 1998, Leah and I moved to Deadwood, South Dakota, where I took my first full-time job as a physical therapist. It turned out that Deadwood was where my meat eating reached its dead end.
    That I could change in Deadwood isn’t so strange, but that I could move from meat and toward plants is something that people still don’t believe. To get even a simple cheese pizza in Deadwood, you had to drive 20 minutes. To shop for something organic or whole grains like barley? Not in Deadwood. So I shopped for the week in Rapid City and planted a garden. My neighbor was a former Navy SEAL who told me I wouldn’t be able to grow even a weed in the rocky hills, but I proved him wrong. We had squash, beans, tomatoes, and peppers.
    I ran nearly every day, anywhere from 10 to 35 miles, through the ponderosa pine forests of the Black Hills and across occasional open plains of grass. One day I found myself surrounded by wild echinacea and picked some. We had echinacea tea that night. My craving for meat had left me, but not my worries about the limits of a meatless diet. My body became a laboratory. I tried combining vegetables and grains, fruits and nuts. One of my more ill-advised experiments involved carrying a small flask of olive oil on a 35-mile run, reasoning that my body needed energy and that oil and fat are the most concentrated forms of calories. A few big swigs, a few episodes of diarrhea, a lot of gas and bloating, and general nausea forced me back to the drawing board.
     
    At every opportunity, I ran out my back door into the surrounding hills or drove to the Bighorn Mountains, where I’d spend hours running through the wild mountains of Wyoming. I loved those runs, but I didn’t love my life. Many of the people I was trying to help were smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, ignoring their exercises, and eating junk. It was frustrating, but it was hard to blame them. They didn’t know any better. Deadwood was lonely for a pair of newlyweds, especially when one of them worked at a job that seemed like pushing a rock up a hill. I brought my worries home with me. I didn’t know what to do with them, and neither did Leah. I began to spend more and more time running in the hills with my training partner, Tonto, an Alaskan husky who loved to run free as much as I did. I felt a calling from those hills, a primal urge to run, something that kept beckoning me.
    I had been reading more about Buddhism and self-actualization. I wanted the peace that these mystics talked about. I wanted the serenity I found in movement, the calm that spread through me the longer I ran and the more fatigued I got. Winning had thrilled me, but what thrilled me more was