The athletes who find vegan food gives them the edge
Fresh off an overnight shift, Kevin Duffy, a Yonkers firefighter, meets his longtime Ironman triathlon training partner and fellow vegan, Steve Quinn, for a morning workout session in the “pain cave.”
The cave is Quinn’s garage-turnedhome gym in Scarsdale, New York. It is around 9am, five hours after their usual 4:15am meeting time, an accommodation made for Duffy’s temporary nocturnal schedule, or night tour, as firefighters call it.
“I never did a workout before 7am until I started training with him,” says Duffy. “Now my alarm goes off at 3:50am and we’re doing pullups by 4:20 am.”
Duffy has arrived already warmed up: During his overnight shift at the Station Three firehouse in Yonkers, he has lifted weights and finished a five-mile run at a mile pace of seven minutes and 45 seconds on a treadmill that he keeps tucked behind the company’s fire truck. (It doubles as a coat rack.)
Duffy, 36, and Quinn, 34, who holds a day job as a wealth management and financial adviser in Manhattan, have been training together for four years. They are both serious Ironman competitors. (An Ironman race includes 2.4 miles of swimming, 112 miles of cycling and 26.2 miles of running.) Quinn has completed 10 Ironman triathlons and qualified for the Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii, three times; Duffy has finished five.
The two men not only train together but also eat together sometimes (or at least trade recipes). In an attempt to get better results, both converted to a plant-based diet three years ago. It worked out for them. In 2014, Duffy completed his first Ironman in 11 hours, 45 minutes. The next year, after converting to a vegan diet and losing 20 pounds, he brought his time down by more than an hour. “I had gotten faster and used to the sport,” he says. “But I’d say 45 minutes of that was my diet.”
Duffy and Quinn are not alone. Other top vegan athletes include tennis player Venus Williams, basketball player Wilson Chandler and Olympic figure skater Meagan Duhamel.
For Duffy, going vegan in a firehouse was a challenge. “Guys at work joke with me, they’re like, ‘You’re going to die at 45, watch, and we’re all going to laugh at you,’” he says. “It’s a very opinionated group of guys. They don’t like too much change. They like good heavy meals,” like chicken Parmesan, steak or meatballs, he says. “I’ll stack my locker with cans of beans and brown rice.”
Duffy, who shares vegan recipes and training tips on his Instagram account, @fire_and_ironman, says that, joking aside, many firefighters are truly curious about his regimen. “I’ll make quinoa and beans with soft-roasted veggies, carrots, squash, sweet potatoes,” he says. “My stuff comes out and it’s like, ‘What is that? Let me try that,’” He’s even managed to convert two other firefighters, and his mother, to his plant-based diet.
For both men, the appeal of veganism is not political or ethical, but about reaching higher performance levels as athletes. “You can get into the animal-rights thing – that comes with the territory. The environment, it’s helpful for that as well,” Duffy says. “But I’m just like, at the end of the day, I could kick my 22-year-old self ’s butt!”
A year after he’d gone vegan, Duffy says his company responded to a fire at a split-level ranch home.
“We get off the rig, we go in and the whole bedroom’s on fire. We were inside for 30 minutes. Some of the guys had gone through their air. This one kid was down to 15 per cent and I still had 65 per cent.”
Firefighters carry close to 100 pounds of gear when they enter a building, so just getting to where the fire outbreak is can be a challenge. “The travel time is exhausting,” he says, so losing 20 pounds of body fat made a big difference.
Duffy takes a break in Quinn’s kitchen, where he makes a smoothie with cinnamon, vanilla, cashew milk, fresh spinach, chia seeds, hemp seeds, blueberries, mango and chocolate vegan protein powder. “Food is energy,” he says.
He then heads out to play in a firefighter’s pipe-and-drum band before starting his next night tour. n