How This Vegan Ultrarunner Fueled a 3,175-Mile Cross-Country Trek in 75 Days – runnersworld.com

Robbie Balenger, 34, has just completed a 3,175-mile cross-country trek that has been 75 days in the making.

He’s grown scruffy, sinewy, and more than a little sentimental. “It’s a lot of emotions,” he said to Runner’s World.

The idea for his cross-country trek, which he had dubbed “Robbie’s Plant Powered Mission,” started in Mexico in 2018. Robbie was racing the 50-mile Ultra Caballo Blanco after recently leaving a successful career in the restaurant industry (pizzerias, specifically) in Austin, Texas, and hitting a breaking point.

“I was really grappling—for me it was an interpersonal issue,” he said. “I felt I was giving too much of myself to my career, and not leaving anything to myself. My life was just work as much as possible.”

He described himself as a “weekend warrior,” running when he could to try to balance out the stresses of his job and improve his emotional health.

But being a weekend warrior wasn’t cutting it: Balenger knew he needed a change, one that combined his passion for running with environmentalism.

So after he left the restaurant industry in October 2017, he decided to transition to becoming vegetarian in his pursuit of a more environmentalist lifestyle. “I adopted a plant-based lifestyle to help environmental stressors,” he said. Then in 2018, he went strictly vegan.

“Coming out of pizzerias, I was definitely not vegan,” he said with a laugh. “I just thought, what could I do to advocate for an environmental stance? Going vegan made me accountable to that.”

He decided the best way to make an impact, and to prove that plant-powered fueling as a runner was possible, was to do a run across America.

“My motivation was from an advocacy standpoint to promote a plant-based lifestyle, and to really show what is possible on a plant-based diet,” he said.

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He decided to do it on March 15, 2018, with a goal to run from Los Angeles to New York City in 75 days.

He started training right away, devising a plan that switched things up every 3 to 4 months.

“The first segment I was running 50 to 60 miles a week. Then I upped my mileage to 10 miles a day, taking every 15th day off,” Balenger said. “After that, I went to 100 to 110 miles a week. Then I did about 7 50 milers and 100K races to normalize the distance.”

He set out on his cross-country journey one year and one day after he came up with the idea. On March 16, 2019, he began his journey with his team—anywhere from two to six people each day, including his friends, family, and crew chief/nutritionist—in tow.

“We have a van pulling a camper. I built out a van with a double bed, and that’s where I slept,” he said. “In the camper, we have a queen bed and two double bunk beds, that’s where the crew slept.” The camper also has a three-burner stove, a small refrigerator, and a Yeti cooler to house all their food.

Throughout the course of the run, Balenger ran roughly 45 miles a day, making sure to hit the road by 7 a.m. to get his daily mileage in.

“Going through the Midwest and the Great Plains, it was taking 11.5 hours on average each day,” he said.

He stopped every 5 miles to refuel, with plant-based sources and hydration—but usually not with plain water.

“I pretty much drank zero water—I bet I’ve had less than three cups of water since I left,” he said. “I’ve been drinking Skratch, an electrolyte replacement that has some calories in it. In my hand-held I get about 60 calories, and it provides sodium, sugars, and everything I’m losing through sweating. There wasn’t a chance to give up taking in calories.”

Fueling remained a priority throughout the course of the run. Balenger estimates he was taking in 8,000 calories a day. Here’s what it looked like, on average.

Breakfast (prerun): Oatmeal with chia seeds, bananas, maple syrup, raw almonds, and sometimes chocolate, along with a cup of coffee.
First stop: “This was always really calorically dense—I had a high-fat, high-carb smoothie with a base of Soylent meal replacer,” he said. (Soylent sent him product for his trek). He added coconut milk, chia seeds, bananas, and an array of veggies to total the smoothie to 1,000 calories.
Stop #2: Fruit.
Stop #3: Soylent smoothie.
Stop #4: “This is the stop I tried to take in a lot of carbs—we ended up settling on boiled potatoes with salt, and also ‘cheese’ quesadillas using vegan cheese or cold pasta cooked with olive oil. It set with my stomach the best,” he said.
Stop #5: Soylent smoothie.
Stop #6: Fruit.
Stop #7: Soylent smoothie.
Final Meal: “Throughout the day, I was also supplementing with Spring energy gels. At the end of day, I’d finish with a double serving of an Outdoor Herbivore plant-based camping meal with coconut milk and one IPA beer,” he said. And he also had dessert—Nadamoo! dairy-free ice cream (who also sponsored his trip, along with dairy-free nonprofit Switch4Good). “It was such a good treat.”

His body has held up throughout the 75-day journey, but it wasn’t totally without injuries. Around day 10, he got shin splints in his right shin, which took him down to a limp for a day or two. A shoe change—from zero-drop ones to a pair of Hoka Bondi 6—helped, as did switching from a crew sock to an ankle sock with a compression sleeve.

Then about a week later, he started to feel tendonitis in his left ankle.

Trippe Davis

“I had to wrap my ankle in an Ace bandage to lower mobility, and had to walk out a couple days,” he said.

But he credits his vegan diet with keeping him going, and believes his new way of eating suits his body better.

“Before I went vegan, I would go for a long run, a 20-miler, get done, and be shaky and go smash a double cheeseburger,” Balenger said. “I’d wake up the next day and be extremely sore, like I just wrecked my body.”

He noticed when he went vegan, his started to feel better after his runs.

“I can run, eat all day long, and wake up next morning and get ready to go again,” he said.

Still, while he is promoting a plant-based lifestyle, he understands it’s not for everyone. But he appreciates that running has given him a platform so he can share his thoughts with a wider community.

“It’s important as runners to understand you can really be a catalyst of change for others,” he said. “There are a lot of people struggling with their health and struggling to get their bodies moving. Being a runner, you can leverage your experience and talk to other people about how good it makes you feel.”