Crazy Legs

Punishment for Gluttony

You probably know the hunger. It starts with small pangs during a run, which you stave off with restraint, or maybe a few gulps of a sports drink or a gel. As you continue to run, the effort of the exercise suppresses the need for calories. You feel as though you can run forever with no more sustenance than the stores in your muscles and fat tissue.

But eventually the hunger strikes, and it ’s allconsuming. Your hands begin to shake. You feel a numbness in your limbs. Your mind overf lows with thoughts of food, substantial, delicious food. It runs on an endless loop like an animated gif, no matter how hard you try to divert it. You begin to understand how Olympic runner Louis Zamperini pondered eating the leather of his shoes while adrift in a lifeboat on the Pacific Ocean after his plane was shot down during the Second World War. Lucky for you, you’re not trapped at sea in a small lifeboat. You can actually feed the hunger.

American ultrarunner Dean Karnazes famously ordered pizzas to be delivered to street corners, so he could run by, pick up the pizza, fold the whole thing in half and chow down on it as he continued running. Inspired by Karnazes, I decided to start feeding my hunger when it struck during long runs, especially very long runs when I was training for ultras.

I found that if I was running at a relatively slow pace, I could eat real meals without upsetting my stomach. I ran into pizza shops and munched large slices as I ran, chomped down full baguette sticks and inhaled boxes of pastries in the middle of long runs. I chose running routes based on locations of bakeries and burrito joints, ravenously devouring all manner of delicacies, sometimes dripping grease onto my singlet as I ate and ran. I don’t want to know what I looked like.

Those were not my proudest moments, but the f lavour! My taste buds, heightened to the extreme by the hunger, lit up like fireworks as the gooey glaze of a Danish melted on my tongue. The primordial reward system from millennia of foraging for food kicked in.

Sometimes, of course, the hunger hit hardest after my runs. My wife looked on in astonishment as I ate an entire large pizza after a long run. And a couple of hours after crossing the line at the New York City Marathon, I wolfed down a monster of a burrito, which was about the size – and I think, weight – of a human head.

There is immense joy in the gluttony of consuming those thousands of burned calories. And sometimes the best treats are the simplest foods. One of best things I ever ate during a run was a crisp, sweet Ontario apple. I bought it from a fruit stand at a farmer’s market, near the end of a 45k run. I bit off a giant chunk of it in my first bite, with that satisfying crunching sound echoing through my head as juice splattered about. The f lavours burst through my mind as I slurped the drips off my lips. The hunger was staved off. For a time.