When Deena Kastor (then Deena Drossin) was eleven years old she fell in love twice: first with running and then with cooking. At first she thought of her athletic and culinary passions as completely separate, but as she grew older they converged. At the University of Arkansas, Kastor spent what little free time she had outside of classes and track practice reading cooking magazines, wandering the aisles of grocery stores, and sweating over a hot oven. One benefit of these extracurricular activities was that Kastor ate much better than the average college student did. This may be one reason she was an eight-time NCAA All-American at Arkansas.
Kastor went on to achieve even greater success as a professional runner. She set American records in the marathon and half marathon that still stand, won the Chicago and London Marathons, earned a pair of World Cross Country Championships bronze medals, won numerous national championship titles, and, most memorably, took home a bronze medal from the 2004 Olympic Marathon. Throughout her stellar career Kastor was fueled largely by her own cooking and she always believed that her love of food preparation was a major contributor to her success.
I think she’s right. There’s a difference between nutrition knowledge and food knowledge. Having nutrition knowledge is great, but we don’t eat nutrition—we eat food. To eat well it is necessary to translate nutrition knowledge into food knowledge. This is where people who like to cook have an advantage. Women and men who are comfortable in the kitchen tend to stock their refrigerator and cupboards with better foods, include greater variety in their diet, rely less on fast and processed foods, and therefore eat healthier than do people who don’t cook, regardless of their level of nutrition knowledge.
I’m not saying you have to be a world-class chef (I’m not) or prepare a complicated dinner every night (I don’t) to eat healthily. I’m just trying to make the point that eating well comes down to eating good food. And the purpose of this chapter is to help you do just that.
As you’ve seen, there are just two basic rules you need to follow in your everyday diet as a runner. First, you need to consume enough carbohydrate to get the most out of your training. In addition to this, you need to maintain diet quality balance to shed excess body fat and get down to your optimal racing weight. Naturally, you must heed these two rules simultaneously in your diet. To do this successfully you will need to base your diet on meals and snacks that include lots of high-carbohydrate, high-quality foods but not so exclusively that variety—or enjoyment—is sacrificed.
“I believe you can eat anything you want,” Deena Kastor told me back in 2003. “It’s okay to satisfy your junk food desires, as long as you fill up mainly on healthy foods.”
The process of bringing your eating habits in line with the Two-Rule Diet will not take place in a vacuum. You already have a particular way of eating that you must now modify to some extent for the sake of your running. There are well-defined eating customs in our society. By tradition we eat three meals a day and perhaps one or more between-meal snacks as well. These meals have traditional compositions; most people don’t want sushi for breakfast or oatmeal for dinner even if they can be convinced that these choices make nutritional sense. Fortunately, you can elevate your diet quality and get enough carbohydrate to support optimal training without flouting such cultural conventions. In this chapter I will present a selection of normal, recognizable foods to eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks that will enable you to consistently meet your diet quality requirement and your carbohydrate needs. These meals and snacks are offered merely as suggestions and guidelines and should not be considered mandatory. There are plenty of other foods you can use to attain diet quality balance and meet your carbohydrate needs. Feel free to go with your personal preferences.