Category: Running

How running has changed my backpacking

Kenneth Shaw on August 11, 2017

Last year I made a 7 day trip through Iceland, north to south through some incredible countryside and even meeting up and joining the Laugavegur trail for 5 days. It was a lovely trip and I had about 10 kilos of gear and food with me for the excursion. The hike at times was tough, or atleast one or two days of the journey was tough, all in all, on a scale of 1-10 for difficulty I would rank it around a 5. A great trail for anyone who is properly prepared. There are however two major inclines (major..) on day one while leaving Landmannalaugar and day 5 between Porsmark and Skogar. These two inclines kicked my ass in every possible way. The last day I was so tired on the incline between porsmark and skogar that I thought I would die. If memory serves me the total incline was around 900-1000 meters. I thought at the time, that considering the circumstances (climbing a 1000meter cliff with backpack on), that I did quite well. It wasn’t until I did my recent trip through Sarek national park in Northern Sweden, that I realized the truth behind my Iceland trip.

Let me paint a little picture here. Hard wind, rain, knee high swamp for hours on end, daily 500-1000 meter inclines and declines, waist high wading and to top it all off – no trails. Complete wild and a 13kilo backpack. That was my most recent trip to the Sarek national park in Northern sweden, a few hundred kilometers north of the arctic circle. This trip was demanding in every possible sense of the word. On my gear, physique and psychology. But I didn’t feel it. My body was such a well oiled machine for this trip that I literally felt as if I could turn around and do it again without any problems. I didn’t have any of the normal knee, back or lung issues. And on the last day I was afraid to tell my traveling companion just how damn good I felt (after a 1300 meter incline with my backpack on) because I didn’t want him to think I was doing the “manly” thing of bragging about how cool I am I could carry my backpack up a hill. (like many of the heavy miserables that like to brag about how much weight they can carry)

My body was functioning better than it ever has on a backpacking trip, this was on minimal sleep and a deprivation diet. Honestly, no matter how much food I pack and eat I still run a deficit on these kinds of trips. The changes this year compared to last year, and the relatively easier Laugavegur trail? My running and diet changes I made late last year. Since going full vegan and running I have lost around 22 lbs (10 kilos) off my body, that’s 10 kilos my legs don’t have to carry when backpacking and the insane amount of carbs I eat on the diet fuels me like nothing else. My running has improved my cardio exponentially, when last year I could barely make the last incline on the Laugavegur trail, this year I did that same 0-1000 meter climb on several occasions and felt damn good.

While my backpacking trip wasn’t full vegan, in fact I snuck in some powdered milk to my breakfast and cheese on the last day at the hotel.. Oh and I did make the mistake of eating a sausage, it had always been the mainstay of my backpacking trips – the reward at the end of the day kind of thing. Only to realize my taste buds have changed, and what once tasted like gods hands massaging my tongue, now tasted like salted dead pig and had the effects you would expect on my daily shitting habits. With that said, I don’t beat myself up about it, I am always working towards long term health goals and benefits, and I can’t kill myself everytime I make a slip up. Beside, being a bitch to other people about their habits is probably the worst thing to do to get converts.

Anyway, last year after laugavegur I was satisfied, ready to hang up my boots for a while a relax. Much like a traditional hiker who normally takes a year off between longer hikes, I felt much the same. Now, the only thing I want to do is get out again. My body, feet and soul feel perfect after my last trip and I can only credit my diet and training habits.

marathon Running

Lessons from my first marathon

Kenneth Shaw on June 6, 2017

I did it, it hurt, at times it sucked, and times it was glorious. It was a hell of a lot harder than I expected, and definitely more emotional than I thought possible. I ran and finished my first marathon on Saturday. I set a goal in early February that I wanted to run and complete the Stockholm marathon in June. This with no previous running training, or any training for that matter, certainly not cardio in at-least 15 years. I felt it was ambitious, but at the same time a challenge I needed to keep myself motivated.

I could write for days with regards to how the race went, and mental process needed to complete, how my body felt, or how about an old man getting a heart attack next to me while running. I could explain all of this but I won’t, I will let this experience be mine and mine alone. It was something deep and profound and something I need to hold on to a while longer. With that said, I will write about the lessons I learned and will bring with me on future runs and I hope will even help you on yours.

Lesson 1

Everyone has to take a shit at the same time on race day. Standing in line to the toilet will take a minimum of 45 minutes of standing and waiting patiently. A good choice is to just hold it at and lay down and relax, take a shit somewhere along the run where the toilets are always empty instead.

Lesson 2

Don’t shave. While waiting and eating some pre-run food, I noticed rows and rows of beautifully shaven men and women, glistening in the sunlight the baldness of their bodies. I also noticed how every single one of them spent an amazing amount of time greasing themselves up and down with vasoline in places I didn’t know could get chapped. My tactic was to do as usual and not shave my ass crack, chest or underarms and allow my hair to protect my body. Worked perfectly. No chaffing anywhere.

As a precaution for chapping between my thighs (no thigh gap here) I bought shorts with built in tights.

Lesson 3

Run more on roads if training for a marathon. I ran a lot leading up to my first marathon. But the trails had been mixed between street and dirt paths. The difference in pressure on feet and knees is astounding when tacking on heavy kilometers. While the first 25 kilometers my body held up well, the last 10 hurt really bad as my left foot had given out completely.

Lesson 4

What is the difference between the marathon racer that runs in 3 hours and the one that runs in 5 hours? The runner running in 5 hours probably had a hell of a lot tougher time as she was standing and pounding her knees, feet and body for two hours longer – not including the aforementioned 45 minute wait before the race to take a shit.

So the lesson here – train speed, get the marathon done as quickly as possible, it only gets worse as the hours pile on.

Lesson 5

Energy gels mixed with Coca Cola, bananas, pickles, clif bars and energy drinks is an absolutely revolting mixture of puke inducing running fuel. I was told to eat everything I could along the run, and from my experience of running longer runs my bodies energy usually crashed at around 20k if I didn’t eat. So I took this advice to heart and ate everything I could. Energy gels must be the single most disgusting edible product on earth, it doesn’t get better with pickles.

Lesson 6

Find your reason why. If you don’t have a strong enough reason to complete the race, your not going to, it’s as simple as that. My reason started with Scott Jureks saying ”sometimes we just do things”, but I found that wasn’t strong enough, it wasn’t strong enough because it wasn’t my reason. It is Scotts. I found after 30kilometers I had to find my why, my reason behind it all and I did.

I started my running and vegan lifestyle after a visit to the doctors office pretty much ended with the doctor saying take pills or die young. I believe firmly in the ability for the body to heal itself, especially if given the proper nutrition. So I changed to a plant based whole food diet and the results so far have been astounding. My energy levels have increased majorly, I don’t get sick anymore, I’ve lost a lot of weight and all in all I just feel amazing.

However my reason for doing all of this, the running, eating and for the purpose of this article, running the marathon was one thing. To live to be an old man for my young boy. I didn’t want to be couch ridden, or bad heart and can’t play with him. So my mantra for completing the race fitted me perfectly and gave me the boost I needed to complete ”Old man for you”.

Running

Faster, stronger, less fatass…

Kenneth Shaw on May 29, 2017

My running progression is coming along good enough. I’m not completely happy with my results so far but I am in a lot better condition and position than I was at the beginning of my running career in January. Running has now become fun, which in the beginning it most definitely was not. My new found whole food plant based diet keeps me well fueled and ready to run at a drop of a hat, and my once painful 1 hour 6 minute 10 k, has now become an easy 50 minute 10k. I hope this time next year I will be able to be in the 40 minute mark.

Some problems I am having though is proper fuel for my longer runs, and considering I have a marathon in 5 days, this is something to worry about. I feel I start crashing after 15 k, and I usually have to stop 5 minutes, eat an energy bar, drink coconut water and then I can continue. Then When I get up at 20 k my body is completely depleted and I hit sometimes (not all the time) the provibial wall where my body simply can’t move. I’m guessing that I have to be better at eating at every 30 minute intervals, which is something I haven’t been very good at.

So my strategy and goal for the Stockholm marathon is to run in 4 hours 30 minutes. My strategy to do this is to run at a cool but easy pace and eat at every station regardless of my hunger or lack there of. I’m not too concerned about my endurance, just my fuel. Keeping my body well fed I think will be the key for me.

On a side note, a combination of my diet change and my running I have now lost around 20 pounds of fat and body fat down to around 21%. Still high, but I’m not trying to diet, I am making lifestyle changes that I plan to keep throughout my life time. I don’t really care about the get fit quick, though I do think that with a little more discipline around sugar and fats, that I should be able to move my progress considerably faster. I don’t really have any goal in site, just to be at optimal running weight which I believe is about 77 kilos for me and 12% body fat. This should lower the pressure on my back, shoulders and knees. Right now I am somewhere between 86-88 kilos depending on the day…

My plans for after the Stockholm marathon include a couple of half marathons and if I’m feeling courageous perhaps another marathon before the year is done. As I’ve said before, I am literally starting from scratch so my goals are more for building a base and a love for running, than going all out and risking burning myself out. But as with all things I need to compete inorder to stay interested, I need the competition in order to get myself out the door everyday. At-least this is how I feel right now.

mindfulness Running Uncategorized

When doubt takes over

Kenneth Shaw on May 8, 2017

Yesterday I ran 26 kilometers during a competition called the Lidingö Ultra. It was both a 26 and 50k competition. I was complete garbage during this race. 26km for the most part is not a problem for me, but 26km on a course that likened a roller coaster I found to be too much. for the first 16km life was good, I was truly enjoying the run and having a great time. Then somewhere along the line doubt started to creep in, maybe it was the burning in my thighs, or the pain in my back, or my empty stomach screaming louder than normal. In any case, the doubt crept in and the more doubt I had the bigger the challenge became.

This particular course has 20 steep inclines and deep declines to match along the 26k course. I don’t normally run these kinds of courses but I thought it would be a great challenge. It was definetly a challenge, and I times I just wanted to throw in the towel. In any case I crept along the finish line and can say I did it. Though along the way I started doubting me ever becoming a real runner, you know, the runner that runs 50k on this kind of trail in 3 hours? which by the way was the winners time.. 3hours 16 minutes on a 50k roller coaster. Insane!

When I got home I crashed on my sofa and just watched football and ate anything my body could take in.. I was spent. No matter how much I ate I was still hungry.. Crazy day. With that said, today I am looking forward to my first marathon in june. Yesterday I was hating the idea and was thinking about dropping out, not anymore. Today I feel good mentally and physically.

Once I was done with the race I started thinking about all the times I let self doubt get in my way. When I let self doubt become my provibial brakes to achieveing my goals. This was certainly not the first time I had self doubt, and won’t be the last. This just happened to be in my mind the biggest physical challenge I have ever had to overcome. We all have self doubt, it’s a perfectly natural occurance, it’s when we let the self doubt become the main voice in our heads, that’s when we fail. Yesterday I was feeling good, my body was feeling fantastic, until I let my mind take control of the situation.

Today when searching articles about self doubt I ran across Zen habits recent post on just this specific feeling.

“We doubt ourselves, feel inadequate, dislike our looks, criticize our failing harshly, feel uncertain about whether we’re worthy of praise or love.

The result is anxiety, procrastination, fear, and the inability to change our habits. I’ve seen so many people who are unable to stick to an exercise program or healthy diet changes because they don’t believe in themselves. At the heart of their failure to make positive changes is a deep feeling of unworthiness and inadequacy.

Every time we fail, we are harsh with ourselves, and we see it as just more evidence that we suck. Every time things are less-than-ideal, we blame ourselves (or, if we don’t want to be blamed, we blame other people).

What if, instead of beating ourselves up (or blaming others), we just accepted what happened and then took appropriate action? What if we took this as an opportunity to see our humanness, to love ourselves, to see ourselves as innately good?”

When backpacking and self doubt starts to creep in I can just focus on what an amazing experience being in the outdoors is. When the weather turns to shit I can just say the old swedish mantra to myself “no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing”. When writing, I am convinced that my writing is terrible, even this stops me from writing sometimes. But to get over that feeling I just start writing and eventually I find a flow in what I’m doing and everything else disappears.

With running though? Obviously I have some work to do… But my strategy going forward will be as follows:

Medidate pre-run to clear my mind and relax my anxieties.
Train better – I had been training for a relatively flat marathon the last couple of months. I don’t see and hill training will hurt my marathon running so I will start adding some hill work in my runs.
When doubt starts to creep in mid-run find somthing other than pain to focus on. Yesterday I got so focused on how much my legs hurt from the roller coaster run that I couldn’t find any joy in the run itself.
My focus point when all else fells should or could be a mantra of some kind. Scott Jureks mantra is “sometimes we just do things”… simple and fun.

Gear reviews Running

Gear Review: Merrell all out terra trail shoes

Kenneth Shaw on April 17, 2017

After my Iceland trip last year I realized it was time to buy new shoes as I had started using tape to keep my Haglöfs together. I’m not a big buyer of shoes so I had no idea what was being made at the time. I did however have a plan in my head of designing my own pair of hiking shoes. My ideal pair that I would design would be as light as the Haglöfs LIM low but offer superior grip, would have better toe and heel protection and if possible would even have a built in gaiter to keep rocks out. This to me would be the perfect trail hiking shoe.

So in my new found inspiration in life, and absolutely certain I had invented in my head the next great shoe; I decided to make my way to the local gear shop here in Stockholm and get more inspiration for how my new shoes might look. Little did I know how far shoe development had come in the time since I last bought a new pair of trail shoes. While a lot of the shoes I was looking at was close to what I had in my head none of them checked all the boxes… Until I ran across a pair of Merrell All out terra trail shoes. They had the same lightness (almost) as my beloved Haglöfs, they had much better grip with the vibram sole, toe and heel protection and as an added bonus they even had a built in gaiter.

It didn’t take me long to do the math in my head: Either buy these shoes for 100usd or invest thousands of dollars, design a pair, spend countless hours making different prototypes and in the end make simply a competing shoe that probably wouldn’t be as good as these shoes. So I purchased the shoes and a year later I’m not disappointed. For one my toes aren’t black and bruised anymore from stomping on rocks, I’m not sliding down the side of a cliff because of bad grip and I no longer have to bring gaiters with me.

Features:

These shoes have excellent grip for most surfaces besides ice. I have done trail runs, backpacking and regular road races in these shoes and I am not at all concerned about the grip. You can’t go wrong with Vibram soles and the Merrell all out terra trail shoes make the best of it.

Mesh all around no goretex to be seen anywhere means these babies get wet fast and dry just as fast. Perfect! Even the tongue and insides are mesh. This shoe is perfect for the trail.

No more black and bruised toes. This nice solid rubber toe guard protects my toes from any rocks or branches the trail happens to throw at me. I still stumble on my ass, but atleast I’m not sitting for 10 minutes holding my toes.

The Merrell allout terra trail shoes have excellent heel protect, side protection and a built in gaiter. Whats not to like about these near perfect trail shoes?

The Merrell allout terra trail shoe fits like a glove around the feet. I am truly impressed by these shoes and even after about 500 kilometers they are still holding strong.

Weight:

The allout terra trail shoes are light, not as light as some trail shoes on the market, but I will take the extra weight for the total protection and gaiters anyday. These shoes weigh in at 333 grams each or 666 for both.

Comfort:

The Merrell allout terra trail shoes fit my foot very well. I love the gaiter wrap and the missing tongue. These shoes just sit tight regardless of the terrain. The only real negative here is that I usually need a pair of Superfeet in my shoes, on the Allout terra trail shoes a pair of superfeet make the shoes lose their form a little. Or perhaps I need to buy a smaller pair. Not really sure, but they don’t pass inside the shoe as well as on some other shoes. But that’s not the worst thing in the world to deal with as the shoes are comfortable without superfeet insoles.

Conclusion:

As I stated in the introduction of this review, I had gone into the shop looking for ideas to the shoes I had already designed in my head. I was thinking of either starting my own company with my own shoe design or going Haglöfs with the design idea and see if they would license it. I left the shoe store with pair of Allout terra shoes and never looked backed. These are exactly the shoes I had in my head. Truly worth the investment. I see no reason not to buy these shoes if your looking for an excellent pair of outdoor trail shoes. I can’t really judge them as trail running shoes as I have only run a few runs in them totaling about 100kilometers. However I do have closer to 600kilometers walking in them.

Running Training vegan wfpb

My training and progression in running

Kenneth Shaw on April 16, 2017

I just ran my first half marathon, my body and feet are still sore and my stomach now full from my first real meal in 7 hours. I certainly didn’t break any records on this run, but considering in January I was puking from a 10 kilometer run, I would say I feel damn good. I had no real reason to run other than the fact that I felt like it. The weather was nice and I needed to get out and explore. It was an excellent run, and while certainly tough, was a lot of fun.

In January I ran my first 10k ever in my first competition ever called the Stockholm winter run. It sucked. My time was 1hr 7minutes and I thought I was going to die. I never considered myself a runner, but I had always fantasied about it. In the last 5 years I might have run a total of 10 kilometers and on top of that I haven’t done any kind of training in well over a year or so. I was convinced running was for other people, you know, the small, skinny people who couldn’t cut it at any other sport.

My training program

I will be honest with you here.. I am by no means an expert when it comes to training for my runs. As I wrote earlier in this post, I haven’t run much in my life. But I have read a few books, and really tried to get caught up quickly, and so far what I am doing seems to work. My first 10k I ran in January took me 1hr 7 minutes and nearly killed me. My heart rate was firing hard and I had to take a few breaks along the way. My second 10k that I ran two months later I did in 56 minutes and I felt I could have done a lot better, my energy levels and endurance was through the roof. I originally got my idea on training from again the book born to run. Or atleast the idea of how running should be and I kind of took it from there.

In the book born to run the author talks about how his trainer said ”slow down, if it’s not fun your doing it wrong”. Or something like that. So I kept that in mind when I started my training, I would slow down if I was breathing hard or feeling that my run was tough. Why not very specific, it worked in keeping me motived in the beginning. From there I later read a book by Rich Rolls called Finding ultra. Here he gets more specific and talks about heart rate zones. Namely he discusses how he could go hard but would burn out quickly. So his training coach told him to never pass 140 beats per minute and run longer.

After playing around with different training and running apps I eventually landed with iSmoothrun that allows me to pretty much do anything I need from an app and export to any other systems such as strava and so on. I setup my heartrate in 5 zones. 1 is a light walk, 2 is a bit harder walk, 3 is a light jog, 4 is a good race pace and 5 is death. Well not really death, but I can’t run very far in zone 5. Zone three is somewhere between 135-143 Beats per minute (bpm), and this is where I do all of my training in.

I try to do 4-5 10k’s a week (about an hour and five minutes in zone 3) and now I added 1 long run on the weekend which is anywhere between 1 hour – 4 hours. Distance is not as important for me as time running. I find that because I haven’t run a lot in my life that I definitely have to work on my endurance. I already know I can keep a good pace for over 2 hours, now I just have to increase the amount of time running.

Heart rate zones:

1 – light walk

2 – faster walk but not running

3 – Light jog – builds endurance and is fun to run in

4 – tougher, good race pace

5 – max heart rate zone

Running:

Always do all my training in zone 3. It’s fun and builds endurance.

Every run is at-least 5k (35 minutes). While most runs now are around 10k (1 hour)

I try to run 4-5 days a week with a long run on the weekend between 2-4 hours long.

Though I am still working on my endurance for the long run – it wasn’t so long ago that I couldn’t run a 10 k (less than 3 months ago), now I am running them several times a week and having a blast.

Perhaps soon I will include 800 meter yasso’s

Yasso: take the time you plan on doing the marathon (your 10k times 4) for me this would be 4hours and 15minutes (I’m not breaking any records here). Anyway you run 800meters in the time in minutes and seconds. So for me this would be 800meters in 4minutes and 15 seconds, then light jog 4minutes and 15seconds and repeat 6-7 times.

I haven’t included yasso’s or any other kind of sprints into my training as I am still just trying to build endurance and not really too concerned with speed yet. Perhaps that will be at a later time. But so far I love my long endurance runs and I don’t really want to burn myself out doing sprints and anything else that could kill my motivation.

Nutrition

I found rather quickly that I simply couldn’t keep my standard paleo diet any longer the more I was training. Besides the fact that I was always getting sick, I realized that I simply didn’t have the needed energy to do my runs as often as I wanted to, as my body simply needed a lot more high quality carbs. So I made a change over to a WFPB (Whole Foods plant based diet) – vegan. And found the results to be amazing so far. I have a lot more energy, I’m not getting sick anymore (from 2-3 times a month for the last couple of years to nothing), and as an added bonus I’m not getting cramps anymore nor am I bed bound after a heavy meal.

My pre-run nutrition on regular 10k run days is just about any vegan meal a few hours before my run and coconut water with me along on the run. This gives me plenty of energy for these runs. I run mid-afternoon usually right after work as it’s a good time for me. It’s easy to get motivated to run after sitting at a desk for a few hours.

Perhaps later on I will try and move this to early mornings as I’m usually awake around 5am anyway, I just haven’t found the motivation to change this part of my routine yet.

I’m still working on my nutrition needs for my long run days, but so far I usually do my long runs on the weekend so I eat my morning bowl of oats laced with Maca powder, spirulina powder, sunflower seeds, pumpkin and chia seeds. I give my stomach a two hours to rest, then a drink a small smoothie consisting of beets, coconut water, bananas, apples, some nuts and seeds as well as Maca powder and spirulina powder and topped off with kale.

On the long runs themselves I bring coconut water and two homemade energy bars consisting of dates and nuts of some kind. (Can be found in backpacking recipes section of this site.)

That’s it. That is my running nutrition at the moment and I feel amazing. I feel like I’m in my teens about energy wise and my recovery time is fantastic.

Goals:

So now that I am running my ass off what is my motivation? In the beginning I started running because I felt it was something I had always wished I could do. Felt like something that I had to do. My duty as a human I guess. Can’t explain it. My other motivation is that I figured if I could run a marathon than my long hikes should never be a problem again. As I started to run, and now I feel like I am getting pretty good at it, my goals include running ultra marathons, marathons and trail running. No real reason anymore, just a ”why not” kind of thing. Kind of like backpacking, or as Scott Jurek likes to say ”sometimes we just do things”.

It’s fun… it’s as simple as that!

backpacking blog Living simply mindfulness Running

A little secret

Kenneth Shaw on April 2, 2017

I’m going to fill you in on a little secret, something that has been in progress for sometime and only now am I starting to accept it. It all started about 6 months ago and was cemented into place around 3 months ago. Since around 2014 I have been sick constantly, in fact somewhere around 2-3 times a month from anywhere between two days to weeks at a time; to say that is has been difficult to keep to a training regime is an understatement. I figured I wasn’t getting enough sleep, or my child was making me sick, or I became allergic to something. In any-case I figured it would go over soon enough so I never bothered with going to the doctors.

On top of always being sick I have had very little energy over the last couple of years. I figured it was part of getting older! However after finally getting sick of always being sick I decided it was time for a change. I was sick of being sick and tired!

Before I go any further let me roll back my timeline another two years about the first time I tried to get into running, it was after I read the phenomenal book Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. It was this book that inspired me to start running, and with that I also learned that I couldn’t keep any routine as I kept getting sick all the time. I also figured that losing some weight and running more is probably a good idea considering my “adventurous” lifestyle.. or backpacking.

I kept giving it a shot, and whenever I needed some extra motivation I would go back to reading Born to run. Well, getting sick and being tired has a bad habit of sapping what little motivation I had to move and at the same time I started to get more fat than usual around my stomach and chest. Man boobs started to form and where I once had a slight visible muscle definition was now replaced with fat and mushyness. My thin muscular face has been replaced by a somewhat gooey one. To say I was aging bad, in my opinion was an understatement.

I had always followed the Paleo diet or carb free diet for most of my adult life, not religiously but it had definitely become my lifestyle. I preferred a steak a plate full of broccoli and sweat potatoes to a pizza. I believe that this kept me from getting overly fat, as the diet does work as a diet. I never thought that it was my diet that was leading to my sickness and getting fat. Then I watched a documentary called Forks over knifes a while ago, more like a year or so ago, and it stuck with me. So I decided to watch it again as well as read a few books on the subject of a whole foods plant based diet. To my amazement these are some of the absolute best researched books i’ve ever read of diet and nutrition such as t he China Study and Whole by Colin t. Campbell. How not to die by Michael Greger and a few others. I also read Rich Rolls book on his similar journey from half dead to making a change; Finding Ultra.

After reading these books I realized that there was a very real possibility that it was my diet that was killing me and not some unknown infliction that came up from hell and has decided to plague me personally. So I figured that I could at-least give the idea of the whole food plant based diet a try for a short while and see if there is any difference. What is a whole food plant based diet? (WFPB diet = VEGAN) Or sort of, in reality vegan could be chips and coke cola, WFPB is a healthier alternative.

At about the same-time I started to make my progress over to a WFPB diet, I finally made my way to a doctor to get my blood work and so on done. The test results came back negative on finding any reason on why I am sick, but came back positive on that I will probably die a young and horrible death due to heart disease as my cholesterol levels where much higher than normal for my age. What did my doctor prescribe? Pills and lots of them or change my diet and start exercising more (this is Sweden, doctors are allowed to prescribe diet and exercise as their not yet completely owned corporate subsidies of the drug industry). I decided I would try diet instead.

My process has been slow, it has taken me several months to replace my typical meat recipes with WFPB alternatives, to empty my shelves of my meat and dairy recipe books, and to restock my fridge and cabinets with vegan goods. When I got the test results from the doctor, my WFPB transition was more or less complete, with the test results pushing me over completely.

Disclaimer: I hate the term Vegan, when I think of the word vegan all sorts of strange shit pops into my head, the PETA people throwing paint on fur wearers, the hippy dread lock guys refusing to shower or wear shoes, or the creepy vegan gangs standing outside McDonalds terrorizing bystanders. With that said, I certainly think animals should be able to live their own lives, but It simply doesn’t sell me on being a vegan, I love bbq chicken wings and a lovely juicy cow on my plate.

No, my motivation for a WFPB diet is this: I don’t want to die a horrible slow death. I don’t want cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s or any other number of afflictions that can be attributed to the typical western diet. I would love to write a lot about the research done and used in the books I listed above, but I won’t. It’s just too much and I prefer everyone to do their own research before listening to me. There are studies of patients, hundreds of patient on their death beds with heart disease and diabetes who went over to a WFPB diet and within months their health improved so much that they didn’t need pills anymore. Many of them in the control groups lived an extra 20 years or more while the subject who continued their traditional diets and moved over to pills and operations died within the first year or two of the studies. I could go on and on, but I will leave that to you. You will know when the time is right, you will feel it in your bones and when you feel it, you will read these books and make the changes.

Stopping to drink some cocunut water and eat a banana on a 70k bike ride

So what are the results so far? Since I converted over to a WFPB diet I have not been sick, not even close to being sick. My energy levels have increased ten fold – I feel like I’m 18 years old again. I have so much energy that in-order to not go crazy I have to get out the house and run! How much do I run? Hundreds of kilometers every month on top of several hundreds kilometers biking. I don’t get tired, I just keep moving. My muscles and bones are completely recovered from one day to the next. I’m sleeping better, I don’t get tired after eating and I’m losing a lot of weight. My energy levels increased so dramatically that I quit drinking coffee altogether – from a liter or so of coffee a day to nothing. To say that the side effects of eating a WFPB diet are far beyond my expectations is again and understatement. The new me is so addicting that the idea of ever going back to a traditional western diet with dairy and meat is simply not a possibility. Another plus side is that most restaurants only have one or two vegan dishes, AWESOME! I don’t have to spend time debating on which of the 20 different meals to choose from.

Left: Just finished the Stockholm tunnelrun 8k
Right: About to run my third competition for the year. 10k which I came in at 56 minutes.

I have no idea what my test results will show the next time around, but honestly, I’m not too worried about it. There is no doubt in my mind that my cholesterol will be radically reduced and my heart will be thumbing at full blast without interference for many years to come.

My mousli banana crunch. A vegan breakfast that taste amazing

So heres to the new me, and my own continued progression, I am even thinking of making a simple VLOG to document my journey. I am also in the process of converting all my backpacking recipes to vegan alternatives and so on. With all this said I hope that you two will do the research and find the motivation to change. It will change your life and make you wonder what the fuck you where doing all these years killing yourself slowly, when you could have been living life to the fullest. Focused, energized and on fire.

Some tips for your own transition:

Watch the documentaries Fork of knives, Food matters and the newest What the health
Read some books The china study, Whole, How not to die
Buy some new recipe books. Fork over knifes has a great app as well as recipe book. The plant power way is a good book. Green kitchen has a great book and App.
Replace your favourite recipes with vegan alternatives. Experiment! you can’t be afraid to try new dishes when making the transition.
Be patient and realistic, the transition is not going to happen overnight. Give it a month or so to take the first steps, then go all in! The feeling of being unstoppable and awesome is addicting.
Remember: on a pure health basis if you want to avoid cancer and all the other diseases and sicknesses attributed to the western diet meat and dairy should not exceed 5% of your total consumption. So in other words, it’s perfectly ok to eat a little cheese now and then if you get the urge!
You don’t need dread locks and wear hemp clothing just because your diet changes. But if you feel like it go for it!

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