Scott Jurek (with Steve Friedman). Eat & Run : My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness. New York : 2012, HMH.
So yes what a surprise, while reading this book, I began to eat more vegetables, I cooked falafel, tried to make tofu burgers. I even remembered some alfalfa sprouts that were hiding at the back of a cupboard and bought shelled hemp seeds at the supermarket. The results? Well, it’s a work in progress…
Eat and Run is ultramarathoner Scott Jurek’s autobiography/(cookbook). It covers his life from his early years in Minnesota to his semi-retirement from competitive racing in 2012, including his youth as a cross-country skier, his first “ultras” and his seven consecutive wins of the Western States 100 (miles endurance run). And yes along the way, a number of recipes are offered : Indonesian cabbage salad with red curry almond sauce, Tamari-lime tempeh and brown rice, Kalamata hummus trail wrap, etc.
Nowadays it seems, a book about running should also have a clear message. For Chris McDougall’s Born to Run it was “run with your bare feet”, for Jurek’s book (that shares a similar blue-skies-and-white-clouds cover scheme), it is perhaps “be a vegan and last longer”. No problems with proteins or iron for this ultramarathoner, the only disadvantage of a non-meat diet for the long run being according to “Dusty”, Jurek’s long-time pacer, that you must stop more often for toilet breaks. In an interview with Outside, Dusty declares about the book that, “if there isn’t one chapter or paragraph to say that he stops every 100 yards to take a poo it can’t really be completely right. You know what it’s like pacing a vegan for 15 years? I always brought extra toilet paper for him. It was always a joke: Scott, man, you’ve got it all wrong. You shouldn’t be going after Brooks, you should be going after Scott’s toilet paper. The general public can relate to that.”
In fact, the books weakness is Jurek’s sometimes childish ranting about his status of quasi-semigod of running, a sort of righteousness that appears more and more as the story advances and that is sometimes irritating, presenting a strange contrast to his self-description as a winner who would often hang around the finish line, in a sleeping bag and for many hours if needed, to congratulate the other finishers. Also, some passages are frankly caricatural in their descriptions of characters and situations, and we are left wishing the writer (and co-writer) had sometimes been perhaps less blunt, just a little more subtle.
But all in all, the book is a good motivator – it does make you want to go run outside, even if it is dark and cold and the roads are filled with snow, Minnesota-style. The link between the runner and nature is strongly expressed throughout the book, from the Mont-Blanc to the Tarahumaras trails and the mountains of California, and is something anyone can relate to. The race descriptions even make something exciting out of racers trudging along at a 6:20/km pace … for 16 hours almost non-stop!
In 2013 Scott Jurek turns 40 years-old, it will be interesting to see if he returns to competitive running (on shorter distances perhaps) or if he enters full-time the author-presenter-3:30-marathon-pacer mode.