The conspicuous consumption of running culture

I talk about food culture in running with journalist and ultrarunner Zoë Rom

Food culture for runners with Zoë Rom

I write about running culture. That’s so not up for debate that it often feels like I’m breaking the fourth wall. What can be scrutinized is what we consider the most important aspects of running culture. I wrote about some broad opinions and definitions of what I think Running Culture is last year, but the whole point is that it’s different for everyone.

What I find interesting is how so many Instagram repost accounts and podcasts talk about running culture only in terms of fashion. Can you tell it’s become something of a bugbear of mine? Because when I think of culture, it takes a while to think of clothes.

When you’re immersing yourself in new cultures, wearing clothes appropriate to the locale is the easiest way to fit in, that’s for sure. You can also visually and immediately communicate a lot about what you want people to know about you through what you’re wearing – a heavy metal band t-shirt, for instance – but, in the same way, clothes are also the most superficial. It’s the feature most likely to elicit the famous phrase of, “My culture is not your prom dress.” The line between cosplay and culture is a fine one.

For runners, it’s often said that the only thing you need to get out of the door is a good pair of running shoes (and a good sports bra), but one thing is truly non-negotiable in my opinion: the food you eat. When it came to writing about runners’ diets and food culture, I immediately thought of ultrarunner and journalist Zoë Rom.

There’s Zoë’s whip-smart podcast Your Diet Sucks, where she cuts through diet culture and nutrition myths using science and humor alongside registered dietician Kylee Van Horn. Zoë also features in my book. In the section where I recommend the running books that I’ve enjoyed most. As someone who’s tried to incorporate sustainability into every aspect of my life, Zoë’s 2023 book with Tina Muir, Becoming a Sustainable Runner spoke to me in many ways.

I wrote a book.

But let’s go back a couple of paras and think about going on a world tour, and thinking about all the different cultures we come across on our travels. What am I doing at each stop? I’m trying to find the hole-in-the-wall food spots and the architecture that speaks to the history of the place – both old and new history. In a world where most people are wearing the same Levi’s jeans in every city, it’s the food and the built environment that tells me the real stories and it tells me them quickly.

In terms of runners, food culture is a mesmerizingly intricate phenomenon. We’re not talking about sharing a gebeta in Ethiopia or sitting down with an exquisite bowl of spaghetti in Rome. This is food as fuel, and ideally food that won’t make us shit ourselves on the 16-miler we’ve got planned. That’s what I talked to Zoë about.

Optimization culture

“Community is not an optimizable thing. It’s a deeply human experience that you can’t quantify, you can’t take it in pill form or in a powder.”

“I think that community and connection resist optimization and a lot of runners and people interested in fitness are trying to over optimize a lot of things, and I think, particularly, food. Look at the proliferation of greens powders, which are going to be redundant for any halfway decent diet. If you’re eating food that includes plants, you don’t need that. It’s gonna be an extremely expensive urine additive.”

I know people who don’t actively enjoy eating food. They are the ones who will chug a flavorless protein smoothie for lunch. For those people, a nutrition pill would be a welcome addition to the menu. And it’s not an incorrect way to think about food. We do essentially eat food to survive, so why not think about the food we’re consuming in terms of our running?

Amateurs vs Elites

“Another thing about food that I think sometimes makes it especially sticky for runners is we are a group that maybe self-selects to be pretty achievement-oriented.”

“It’s true that you might need to have a heightened awareness of your nutrition needs for supporting the training, but I think it’s fine for culture to not always be evidence-based. I don’t think the human experience can or should be quantified into covering your macros or following nutrition guidelines to the letter. That’s just not what humans are on earth to do 100% of the time.”

“I think that with athletes and runners, it can get really easy to take some helpful framework to make sure you’re meeting your baseline needs and get overly attached to them, such that they start to dictate your life and that becomes the culture.”

In this brave new world of Boston Qualification, every marginal gain counts, and it’s something to be wary of obsessing over. You have to ask yourself whether the juice is worth the squeeze. The gels, for me, are certainly not. Precision in-race fueling it may be, but I’m running for fun, and sucking down a sachet of goo is anything but fun.

Zoë and I talk about how outsiders might view us as “maniacs who weigh everything to the gram,” and how Matt Fitzgerald’s book, Diet Cults highlights a study that shows how it’s amateur athletes who are more likely to be overly prescriptive with their diets. The elite athletes, with a better understanding of how to fuel their bodies, were less pedantic. That’s easily related to the beginner endurance runner’s strict adherence to Zone 2 compared to an elite runner just thinking about their runs in terms of ‘easy’ or ‘hard.’

Unhealthy relationships

“I think that there are several cultures. One of the loudest is optimization culture of food as fuel, food as a biological necessity, but not necessarily as a human culture, and getting boiled down to its lowest denominator. I think there can be a time and place for understanding things in that way, but I also would say it is anti-scientific to view food and nutrition in a vacuum because that’s not how humans encounter it. We’re all bringing our cultural upbringing, we’re all bringing a lot of baggage, good and bad, to every food experience we have.”

“There are many other factors besides food and exercise that determine how your body shows up in the world. However, food and exercise feel really controllable, and so people looking for control, like endurance athletes, a lot of times will try to place that control on food.”

Zoë goes on to talk about calorie-counting and unhealthy obsessions with and aversions to food. She says that over 60% of endurance athletes might be in that category. She talks about concerns over weight and health. It’s a tough thing to talk about, and I have little first-hand experience to add to the conversation, which is why I have specifically not written about this topic before. I’ve even removed answers from interviewees talking about how they run specifically so they can eat more. That’s not a healthy relationship with either food or running, but it’s an easy one to form.

Zoë’s favorite thing about food culture in running

“In the same way that folks connect with group runs and a profound social experience, that can really only come from those really human connections of going on a five-mile jog with someone, joining them in a post-race meal or a pre-race carb load. There’s a reason sports teams eat food together. It is a modality of connecting with people that you’ve already had this vulnerable, connective experience with in sport.”

“I think it is that connective potential, and as someone also in eating disorder recovery for about a decade, the sort of healing that you can only get from being around other people who are also having a positive, fulfilling, emotional, connected experience with food. When you’re able to feel it and enjoy it, there’s just nothing else like it.”

“My sort of plea with runners would be to hold things a little more lightly and have moderation in everything. Runners are maybe not a people that are extremely chill at moderation in either way.”

If, while reading this article, you’ve thought something flippant, like, “Why not just try to be more normal about what you eat,” consider that runners are very often trying to be anything but normal. We’re trying to improve ourselves with every step. We’re trying to build a bolder routine for ourselves. We’re trying to change our body so it’s faster, or maybe thinner. We’re trying to learn different and ‘better’ ways of doing all of that, even if it’s actually worse. But we’re trying and we’re exploring.

It’s all hard work that we’re doing, but it does mean that our normal is very different from other people’s, which goes some way to explaining why so many runners struggle with food. We’re all just trying to find happiness through running. It’s important to remember that.

Links

• Go listen to Your Diet Sucks

• Zoe on IG

Thanks for reading
Raz x

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