About Me

In 6th grade I was diagnosed with a benign bone tumor.  After spending a month on crutches, followed by 2 surgeries and another 10 months on crutches, I was cured, but the result was that the growth plate in my 4th metatarsel was gone!  The attached toe has not grown since then.  At one point my doctor suggested to my parents that I would never run well again, and playing soccer was out of the question.  Apparently no one told me.

Tipping the scales at 240 pounds, I was a typical undergraduate, more concerned with my social life than I was with my future.  Something happened towards the end of my Junior year that resulted in me reevaluating my priorities.  Deciding to get back into shape, I started running between 0.8-1.5 miles every day, and my daily running distance slowly grew and grew.  I kept this up for almost a year, losing nearly 80 pounds along the way.  Returning to Michigan State my senior year, many of my friends no longer recognized me, and I experienced somewhat of a renassiance and was able to reinvent myself.  I decided to pursue nutrition, as I had become extraordinarily passionate about diet and human health and soon found myself in graduate school

Now graduate school can be kind of lonely as I am sure many of my collegues can attest.  During my Ph.D. training I occupied my mind and free time with running, and soon found myself running marathons.  I was constantly searching for new challenges and the sport of ultrarunning was just beginning to see a large boom, thus the two of us met and have been inseparable ever since.  I remember running my first Ultra in May of 2009, and wanting to sit down and cry and give up because my mind and body were totally wasted.  Somehow neither of these things happened and I finished the race.  I've been addicted to ultrarunning ever since, and have truly begun to love the sport and the community.

I started this blog because there is so much misinformation and poorly interpreted nutrition information,  and I wanted to discount what I could, and present what I believed to be novel scientific evidence in the realm of sport nutrition theory.  Obviously the blog has become much more than that, I am happily embracing this outlet as a mode of communication about trail running.