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What Can Your Furnace Burn, Baby?

By Stephen Kersh

June 12, 2017

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I’m going to kick off food week with a statement so obvious that I risk coming across condescending, but here it is: Everybody eats food.

I’m getting my dummy opinions out on the Internet early this week, and it honestly is providing me with a ton of existential relief. Let’s keep talking about me, please. When I’m slogging through mileage, all I think about is food. I guess the mileage piece is irrelevant because my mind is usually solely focused on my next casual encounter with carbohydrates, but my cravings are definitely heightened when I’m running enough where people become personally offended by my weekly mileage. I get into a deep, dark place of specific cravings. I finish a run and I want spaghetti and meatballs and it’s 8:30 in the morning. No one is stopping this crazy train. I’m a bad, bad man who just is looking to get my pho fix at midnight.

I’m not sure if the above is at all relevant to the below, but I made a graphic and really wanted to share.

“He did not live on nuts and berries; if the furnace was hot enough, anything would burn, even Big Macs.”

This is obviously a quote from Once a Runner. I believe it comes from the scene where Denton is driving a nearly-lifeless Cassidy home after an unknown amount of repeats of an unknown distance, and Denton stops the car at a fast food restaurant, wrangles Cassidy’s emaciated limbs from the passenger seat, and stuffs a few bucks in his hand. What Denton was doing, with boths words and action, was showing Cassidy that when you train hard, you need to focus on getting proper nutrition. Proper nutrition to Denton takes the form of Big Macs – not nuts and berries. This is obviously not true, but it reinforces some nice blue-collar stereotypes still pervasive in running culture today.

At different levels of training, there exists different level of furnace heat. If you’re really cookin’ up some fire, you can burn down that Big Mac no problemo.

These are the type of glowing red takes you can expect during food week at Citius Mag. Will you learn something about recovery, nutrition, and what not to do? Allow me to answer a question with a question: of course you will.

Stephen Kersh

Former collegiate runner for University of Portland and Georgetown, currently a professional runner weighing sponsorship offers from no one. Enjoys using the internet to message Scott Olberding and Paul Snyder about bad story ideas. Does not assume he will work at Citius much longer due to the bad story ideas. He once gave a TED Talk titled "Twitter: How We Are All Just Shouting into a Vacuum" to his best friend and his girlfriend on the beaches of Connecticut.