Scott Jurek on Eat & Run, and the argument he was tired of having

Recorded the week his memoir came out, when ultrarunning was briefly a mainstream publishing category.

Eat & Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness came out in June 2012 and went onto the New York Times bestseller list, which at that point was a genuinely strange thing for a book about hundred-mile races to do. This episode was recorded around the release.

By then Jurek had won Western States seven consecutive times, taken Badwater and Spartathlon, and — thanks to a supporting role in Born to Run — become the closest thing the sport had to a name a non-runner might recognise. The book was his own account rather than someone else’s, and the conversation spends most of its time on why he wanted to write it.

The diet question

The plant-based diet was the part of Jurek’s story the mainstream press could not leave alone, and by 2012 he had answered the same question several hundred times. The interview handles it without the usual framing. His position was consistent and unromantic: the diet worked for him, he arrived at it gradually rather than as a conversion, and he was not interested in claiming it as the reason he won races.

That restraint dates the episode in a useful way. This was the peak of the period when every endurance result was being attributed to one dietary lever or another, and the most credible people in the sport were the ones declining to make the claim.

After Born to Run

The other running thread is what Christopher McDougall’s book did to trail running between 2009 and 2012. Race entries climbed, the sport acquired an origin myth it had not asked for, and a generation of new runners arrived with strong opinions about footwear. Jurek was a character in that book, which put him in the odd position of being both a beneficiary and a sceptic.

Losing the drive

The most durable part of the episode is the section on motivation — specifically, what happens when the thing you have organised your life around stops pulling at you mid-race. Jurek talks about it as an ordinary feature of a long career rather than a crisis, which is more useful than the version where the answer is always more discipline.

The episode also touches on the Caballo Blanco Foundation, set up after Micah True’s death earlier that year, which had happened only weeks before the recording.