Finding Ultra: A Review of Rich Roll’s Autobiography

Day one starts with a grueling 6.2 mile open-ocean swim, followed by a 90 mile bike ride through the mountains of Hawaii. Day two is an additional one hundred and seventy miles of steep climbs, fast descents, blazing sun and hard rain on the bike. Day three is a daunting double marathon (52.4-mile run). Totaling three hundred and twenty miles, this is Ultraman. An elite, invite only double Ironman that takes place once a year on the Big Island of Hawaii. This is Rich Roll’s chosen sport and he excels at it.

While Rich Roll was named one of the 25 fittest men by Men’s Fitness magazine, this was not always the case. In fact, as Roll details in his new autobiography, Finding Ultra: Rejecting Middle Age, Becoming One of the World’s Fittest Men, and Discovering Myself, just six months prior to completing his first Ultraman, he was nearly fifty pounds overweight and couldn’t even walk up a flight of stairs without pausing to rest. In this riveting account, Roll bares all, sometimes uncomfortably, displaying his awkward and lonely youth, his struggles with alcoholism and his transformation into a vegan Ultraman. The end result, a read that is as moving as it is thrilling.

Roll’s new book recounts how swimming literally saved him as a child. Socially awkward, Roll had a difficult time making friends. His lack of coordination and ill attempt at sports made him an easy target to pick on for other children. However, he proved to be a natural in the water, which consumed much of his childhood. By the end of high school, he was one of the nations top swimmers. Turning down full-scholarships to schools such as Harvard, and Princeton, Roll picked Stanford University. However, by his sophomore year, alcohol began dismantling everything he had already achieved.

Quitting the swim team and trading in his highly disciplined life for a carefree party attitude, Roll quickly descended into a decade of depression and alcoholism. Even still, Roll managed to be a high achieve, earning his law degree from Cornell. After several struggling years where he came close to hitting rock bottom, Roll finally was able to get himself clean. It was at this time he met his wife Julie, who would not only become his best friend, but in many ways also became his savior. 

Roll is a huge fan of his Vitamix

With her encouragement, at the age of forty, Roll abandoned the average American diet, which was killing him, and completely overhauled not only his diet but also his life. As Roll testified, going from the cheeseburger munching, couch potato to ultra athlete was only possible after adopting a whole food, plant-based vegan diet (He also includes three appendixes on how to become plant-strong). Joining the ranks of an increasingly burgeoning list of vegan athletes, the nutrient-dense foods he began feasting on gave him the energy required to train up to twenty-five hours a week, while also maintaining a law business and raising a family. Relying on the discipline he developed as a child, Rich Roll went from a couch potato to elite athlete in under a years time.  

After his first Ultraman, where he placed eleventh out of thirty five, Roll then joined up with his friend Jason Lester to complete one of the most intense endurance challenges ever attempted. What become known as the EPIC 5: five Ironman distance triathlons in seven days, each on a different Hawaiian island, is perhaps Roll's greatest athletic achievement to date. Concluding his narrative  with the 560 mile journey, Roll demonstrates amazing mental strength as well as physical prowess, and as it turns out, it is also quite the page turner. 

          

                                    man                                                    ultraman

Throughout, Roll keeps the narrative moving with enjoyable and fun prose. While fitness junkies will clearly be drawn to Roll’s account, anyone who picks up Finding Ultra will find themselves engrossed in a great story and may even find the urge to lace up an old pair of running shoes or dusting off the bike sitting in the garage. 

However, Roll's book is so much more than just a good story. The last 100 pages of the book changes tone, and morphs from an autobiography to a well researched and easily comprehensible primer on plant-based nutrition. Roll's principles are not that different from Brendan Braziers' with one glaring exception. Roll consistently reminds his readers that remaining flexible is important. While never advocating anything but a vegan diet, Roll does understand that not everyone will want to be so rigid as to follow an exclusively whole food plant-based diet. He himself admits that he enjoys vegan marshmallows occasionally (Let's hope he is talking about Sweet & Sara!). As such, Roll's work can help a person move towards a plant-based diet without feeling completely overwhelmed, allowing him to connect with a far larger audience than just the elite athlete or strict nutritionist.  

The nutrition primer alone is worth the price of the book, and while it is regrettable that he did not include an index, at least for the primer, the work remains top-tier. While it's impact on the sports world is yet to be seen, I for one am happy to add this handy resource to my collection.

In Good Health,

(I should note all of these photos were found on google.)

The Carbo-Loading Tradition?

As many of you may remember, I returned from Nepal just a few days before being whisked off to Miami for my first half marathon! Traveling with a large group of friends- all more experienced runners than me- the night before the race I was out voted on what we would do for dinner. Everyone seemed to agree, lentils were out. Italian was in.

We found a small, lovely Italian restaurant somewhere in Miami. Everyone was getting the same thing- pasta.  For those of you who have been with me since my first post know I’m skeptical about the benefits of having pasta in my diet. Actually, to be specific, I think processed wheat products are a detriment to athletes due to their low nutrient value. Anyway, out numbered and hungry I created a custom order. It was a huge bowl of whole-wheat pasta, cannellini beans, kidney beans, spinach, garlic and fresh, diced tomato sauce. In all honesty, it was both beautiful and delicious. 

Sorry I didn’t think to grab a picture of the actual dish!

The next day I awoke at 4 am for the race and I didn’t feel anymore fueled than usual. While I did fine during the race, and so did all of my companions, it got me thinking about how carbo-loading actually works and so here is my understanding of the science behind the tradition. 

The earliest research on carbo-loading dates back to the 60s when Scandinavian scientists studied non-athletic men’s ability to perform on low carbohydrate and high carbohydrate diets. They found that the low carbohydrate diet resulted in lower muscle glycogen stores which negatively impacted their endurance. When the same men consumed a high carbohydrate diet for several days, their muscles became supersaturated, and endurance times were significantly extended. Based off these studies they created a 7-day program. This program has since been replaced and updated although the general idea has remained the 

Other studies have shown more effective approaches. Tapering your workout regimen while simultaneously boosting your carbohydrate intake can allow you to supersaturate your muscles in as little as three days. When used correctly, this method can amplify your endurance by nearly 20%. In practice, this can help you increase your distance without “hitting the wall” as well as your time. Some studies suggest that your time can improve by as much as 2 or 3%. While it sounds like a small increase, in a multi-hour event that will add up to several minutes!

   Okay, so how and when should you carbo-load? Carbo-loading only works for endurance events. Most authorities agree that the performance needs to last at least 90 minutes before carbo-loading will begin to help improve your performance, so unless you are crawling, you probably won’t need to eat a large bowl of pasta every night for a week before your big 5K that you are training for. Instead just try consuming healthy, high-net value foods. These studies even suggest that the most elite marathon runners, those freaks, mutants, people who run 26.2 miles around the two hour mark also don’t greatly benefit from carbo-loading. This is because it typically takes around 90 minutes of sustained exercise before glycogen levels begin to run low. (More elite athletes will be able to train their bodies to sustain themselves off their fat storages during these endurance events rather than depending on carbohydrates.) If however you are running a marathon and you’re not a super human, carbo-loading is a great idea. 

But before you go running off to your local organic grocer to buy them out of whole-wheat pasta finish reading. Gender also plays a role in how beneficial carbo-loading will be. As evidenced from above, the earliest studies were all conducted on men-and those sexists scientists simply believed that women would experience the same results with muscle supersaturation. However, more recently, studies which focused specifically on women found that females have a more difficult time reaching a supersaturate point than men. Another study was unable to demonstrate any measurable benefit to the women’s performance after reaching supersaturation. Part of the reason has to do with the menstruation cycle. Women have an easier time carbo-loading during and immediately after menstruating. Another factor is that women typically have smaller caloric needs than men and simply can't increase their carbohydrate intake enough to gain benefits from it. As such, women may need to dramatically increase their calorie intake for several days prior to an endurance event, paying particular attention to carbohydrates.

Finally, no matter how much pasta you eat the night before a race, no matter how much you gorge, chances are you will not be able to carbo-load that night. To reach a point where performance will actually improve, one needs to eat roughly 4 g of carbohydrates per pound of body weight each day. In a person who weighs roughly 150lbs, that means nearly 2,000 calories in carbos alone! I don’t know about you, but that seems intense!

 

note: Rich Roll no longer rides Jamis bikes.

The final verdict, in my opinion, is that most non-professional athletes won’t be able to achieve supersaturation of glycogen and should instead focus on staying hydrated and eating a large healthy meal before and after the event. As a very close friend always tells me, “you should never try anything new on race day.” That seems like sound advice to me! Luckily for me, green lentils are 70% carbohydrate so I’ll be BYOL’ing for my next endurance event!

Brazier, B. Thrive (2007)

Burke, L. Middle- and long-distance running. (2007)

Burke, L. Preparation for competition. (2006)

Coleman, EJ. Carbohydrate and exercise. (2006)