You can't outrun a bad diet

Jones and Rodgers did well until their 40's, anyway. Billy has slowed but also cleaned up his diet from what I understand, dunno about Jonesy.

The killer is when a junky diet (especially coupled with heavy alcohol) meets a serious injury or layoff. See Carlos Lopes, Henry Rono, Pat Porter, et al for confirmation.

BazylP wrote:

Thanks for all the replies so far.

At this stage, I'm more interested in your/your friend's/teammate's/another runner's experiences (such as the Steve Jones, Bill Rogers and Takinadump examples above) of running well while eating/drinking sub-optimally(?) so keep the anecdotal stories coming.

In his prime, Don Kardong said his daily diet was Froot Loops for breakfast, two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dessert, and pizza for dinner. Shorter reportedly finished off a big bag of peanut M&Ms every night along with many beers, I had a friend who ran well under 2:20 and basically lived on Mars Bars. He kept several on a table next to his bed and would eat one whenever he woke up at night, had a drawer in his desk at work that was filled with them to eat during the workday, then he'd walk home from work stopping at shops along the way to buy a Mars Bar. He said he did that either until he got home or ran out of money.

On the non-running side of this, my grandparents' generation on my mother's side of the family all lived to somewhere between 90 and 101 basically eating bacon and eggs, meat and potatoes and maybe some canned peas or carrots, and candy.

If the fire is hot enough, anything will burn.

The problem is that sub-optimal fuels do not combust well. Long term, this catches up to you and you pay for eating bad food.

Additional problems occur when the fire is no longer as big and hot as it once was, but you keep stuffing anything in there hoping it will burn.

My friend is 71, Kardong is still alive as are Rodgers, Jones, and Shorter. Gordon Pirie was heavily into natural foods and a "healthy" diet and died of stomach cancer at 60. Ric Sayer was similar and had the Big One at 57 or 58. No one runs as fast as they did in their prime. That's the nature of a "prime."

Should say "two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for LUNCH," not dessert. And his classic line was :Without ice cream there would be chaos and darkness."

Too be fair its easy to say I eat pizza and cereal everyday and say you eat crappy.

But the pizza eaten is whole grain crust and organic ingredients, cereal is cheerios with a protein shake mixed with water.

So if I say cereal and pizza you think junk but its really not.

HRE wrote:

Should say "two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for LUNCH," not dessert. And his classic line was :Without ice cream there would be chaos and darkness."

I am in my 60's, run 50 miles/week pain-free and feel like absolute crap if I eat that junk, but I feel great on whole natural foods. Am I supposed to downgrade my diet so I can scrape past 70?

No thanks, I'll be a hedonist and run healthy and feel great until the Big One knocks me out at 66.

FurIslabs wrote:

Too be fair its easy to say I eat pizza and cereal everyday and say you eat crappy.

But the pizza eaten is whole grain crust and organic ingredients, cereal is cheerios with a protein shake mixed with water.

So if I say cereal and pizza you think junk but its really not.

That is still junk, just Whole Foods expensive junk.

HRE wrote:

[quote]BazylP wrote:

On the non-running side of this, my grandparents' generation on my mother's side of the family all lived to somewhere between 90 and 101 basically eating bacon and eggs, meat and potatoes and maybe some canned peas or carrots, and candy.

How about yourself?

I'm curious what your diet is like and how your wellness fares.

When This was originally said, it was addressed to a bunch of middle aged sedentary women. They literally can’t outrun a bad diet because they’d get injured if they tried to run enough mpw to burn all the calories they were consuming.

Young (10-28) men can outrun a bad diet.

Older Budwiser wrote:

HRE wrote:

Should say "two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for LUNCH," not dessert. And his classic line was :Without ice cream there would be chaos and darkness."

I am in my 60's, run 50 miles/week pain-free and feel like absolute crap if I eat that junk, but I feel great on whole natural foods. Am I supposed to downgrade my diet so I can scrape past 70?

No thanks, I'll be a hedonist and run healthy and feel great until the Big One knocks me out at 66.

I always laugh when people say stuff like this. Get back to us the day before you turn 66. I'm guessing many more years of life will seem more inviting to you at that moment than less than 365 days.

Fooling Yourself wrote:

FurIslabs wrote:

Too be fair its easy to say I eat pizza and cereal everyday and say you eat crappy.

But the pizza eaten is whole grain crust and organic ingredients, cereal is cheerios with a protein shake mixed with water.

So if I say cereal and pizza you think junk but its really not.

That is still junk, just Whole Foods expensive junk.

I'll wager that some of our scrawny stick bodied women runners will look much hotter eating more and gaining boobs and butts when hormones kick in.

All that matters is to keep moving. Something will catch up to you some day. The high and mighty regarding diet are prone to the same random cellular mutations as everybody else. Who knows what genetic shiiit is lurking inside each of us. Aneurism. Boom. Cancer. Pow. Heart disease. Whammo. Stroke. Goner.

Just eat, avoid getting fat and keep that body of yours moving. Enjoy the time you have.

All the rest is fluffery.

.... Speaking of bad diets (well not that bad, but... something, anyway), I just ate an entire 1lb loaf of organic sourdough bread, dipped into soup. I couldn't stop myself; it was good bread. I kept cutting slices off and then it was gone. I don't eat organic really at all, but there's a little specialty store up the street that sells it; I bought it one day when I needed bread quickly, and it was really good, so it's become a regular thing.

I've been upping the mileage quite a bit recently. I'm guessing the two things are related.

Bad food will still clog your arteries or hurt you. Consider that Jonesy might have been even faster had he had better discipline like a modern Nike athlete.

Having said all that, what helps some people do well is be fearless about taking in calories so that they're at least getting enough. There is still useful stuff in some unhealthy things. Paula Radcliffe for example used to eat candy bars around some of her runs. I believe it was a learned behavior from her dad. Candy bars can have plenty of fat, protein, and carbohydrate. You can still benefit from much of that even if half the other ingredients are bad and the fat concentration is quite high.

Boston Billy loved mayo. It wasn't ideal, but it sure took care of his fat and calorie quota.

Meat pies, Coca Cola and Mars bars? That's far healthier than I ate when in my teens and 20s.

And wasted at the start? I recall a few races where I drove to the start area to sleep in the back seat after leaving bars four or five hours earlier, drank whatever I could find when I woke up from the noise, changed in the porty thing, and ran high 30s and 1:0 halves with cotton mouth, aching from dehydration. Then I'd go work noon to midnight, and get up at 7 Sunday to run 20. That was standard.

I already said what was wrong with me in other threads.

The real question is how much better could they have run if they ate healthy? And how much longer would their careers have lasted?

p.s. hilarious account of Rodgers and the Sugar Pops!

this and this wrote:

If the fire is hot enough, anything will burn.

Not unnatural transfat (monoglycerides, most soybean and canola oils). There is no liver enzyme that recognizes them in order to be metabilized

Fooling Yourself wrote:

FurIslabs wrote:

Too be fair its easy to say I eat pizza and cereal everyday and say you eat crappy.

But the pizza eaten is whole grain crust and organic ingredients, cereal is cheerios with a protein shake mixed with water.

So if I say cereal and pizza you think junk but its really not.

That is still junk, just Whole Foods expensive junk.

Care to elaborate how that is junk? Top vitamins and minerals healthy mix of carbs fat and protein.