Tuna and Pickles

As an endurance athlete, I tend to pay a certain amount of attention to my diet. Now, I'm no health nut, and I enjoy my share of fast food, but I still tend to try to keep an eye on what I eat. It's because of this that myself and two of my friends got into the idea of customizing our diets.

The first diet may seem a bit unspectacular, but it has become a thing of lore here in Louisville, and had at one point developed a small following among runners whom I know. It is what myself and my friend Kris like to call the Kris and Andrew Tuna Diet. While I put my name on it, it's my friend Kris who really came up with the idea. It began when he entered the professional world and had to start packing his lunch. He came up with the brilliant idea of packing a can of tuna and bread and calling it a meal.

When I was a Junior in college, Kris and I began training together (he was coaching me at the time) and I began to look on him as something of a mentor. Midway through what was an extremely successful season for me, we had an incident. We were at the track running a pretty intense workout. At the end of the workout, I sat down for a minute to try to rest up before my cool down run. Instead of getting up, I proceeded to lay down and not get up for 5 minutes. After Kris and another runner had to literally carry me to the van to ride back to school, Kris and I sat down and had a talk.

He asked what I had eaten that day, and I answered 2 Pop Tarts for breakfast and a granola bar at about 2:00 in the afternoon. Well, Kris was livid after hearing this and gave me a lecture on my diet being crap. So he explained to me his idea of eating tuna every day at lunch, and I already knew how good it was supposed to be for runners. So the next day I went out and bought cans of tuna. Through the rest of the spring and the entire summer, I ate 2 tuna sandwiches for lunch probably 4-5 days a week. I prospered that season and had a great summer of training. When I began coaching, Kris and I pushed this tuna diet on our athletes, especially those who did not eat enough before practice.

Today, I don't eat as much tuna. For one, eating that much is bad for you. Secondly, I work with a tuna-smelling employee and it sickens me. I don't think I'll be able to eat tuna for a long while now, but it will start again, especially when I begin running seriously once again.

Reminiscing about this tuna diet reminds me of one other crash diet a friend of mine once tried. The same semester I chose to stay up 101 hours, one of my roommates decided he wanted to lose weight. He didn't have a particular plan except to cut down on his calories. One day, out of the blue he was looking at a pickle jar and realized each pickle had roughly 30 calories. Well, this set off a light bulb in his head. He LOVED pickles and decided this would be his new diet. In what officially became known as Doug's pickle diet, my roommate began eating NOTHING but pickles. His goal was to last 2 weeks and see if he lost weight.

He would eat 2 pickles in the morning and several throughout the day. If he ever got tired of pickles and wanted a dessert food, he ate a sweet pickle. Now, I thought my 101 hours was a serious test of will power, but the fact that Doug lasted almost 4 days on this pickle diet is absolutely stunning in my mind. Eventually he could not even fathom the thought of eating another pickle. In the end, Doug didn't lose any weight, and likely consumed enough sodium to last a year, but this was just another legendary tale from Petrik 105 that will live in infamy.