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“Finding Ultra” by Rich Roll – Book Review

Last week, Rich Roll was kind enough to send me a pre-release copy of his new book Finding Ultra: Rejecting Middle Age, Becoming One of the World’s Fittest Men, and Discovering Myself. The book comes out next Tuesday but it’s available for pre-order on Amazon now.

Finding Ultra is a great book about Rich’s transformation from a man on the edge of physical destruction into a world-class endurance athlete able to complete five Ironman-distance triathlons in seven days.  Anyone should enjoy and be inspired by the book, but it’s particularly well-suited for endurance athletes and other people interested in making healthy changes to their diet and/or activity level.

The book has two separate, but related, themes:

First, it’s an inspirational story of overcoming addiction (to alcohol and general unhealthy living) and becoming an incredible ultra-endurance athlete. A big lesson in the book is that anyone can turn around a sedentary and life/health-threatening lifestyle and become fit and healthy. Maybe not everyone can go from couch-potato to Ultraman competitor like Rich did, but anyone can get off their butt and make changes that will make life much more fulfilling and probably make it last longer.

Second, Finding Ultra is a great primer on why a plant-based (“PlantPower” is the term he uses) diet is a necessary piece of the life changes he made and how easy it is to do it. Rich explains why he believes making the switch to a plant-based diet is the healthiest way to live.

Even though Rich includes details about his training regime and the book has a chapter called “A PlantPower Day in the Life” that walks readers through an example of his daily diet, Finding Ultra is not a training guide for becoming an endurance athlete nor is it a step-by-step how-to guide about making the transition to plant-based diet.  But readers do get an understanding of both topics, including a detailed but easy-to-understand answer to the protein question.  Rich does a great job describing the foods he eats and why he eats them.  The book also includes a detailed six page appendix with a list of other websites, books and products for readers interested in finding additional information about plant power and endurance sports.  Readers will finish Finding Ultra armed with more than enough information to start on the road to healthier living and will be inspired to find their next challenge. (And speaking of next challenges… here’s mine.)

One thing that especially hit home for me was Rich’s explanation of the difference between “vegan” and what he calls “PlantPowered“.  I actually read this excerpt from Chapter Seven out loud to Elizabeth the other night:

To me “vegan” meant a far-fetched, hippie way of not just eating, but living. I imagined dreadlocked students at Humboldt State, kicking around a Hacky Sack in Birkenstocks and tie-dyed T-shirts to the melody of the Grateful Dead. Cool for them. But not my scene.

My turn from a dairy- and meat-based diet to a plant-based diet resulted not so much from a desire to adopt a certain lifestyle as from a simple question: What makes my body run the best? And the answer turned out to be simple. Plants make it run the best. And so I prefer to call my own eating lifestyle PlantPowered, a term that gets more to the heart of my relationship with food. Plants are what I’ve used to repair my health. They’ve given me the strength to do what I do. My pro-plant bias is not about being liberal or conservative. It’s about optimizing both short- and long-term wellness. My diet is PlantPowered, and therefore I am PlantPowered. Never in my life has the equation of food to body been more clear. The old adage is true: You are what you eat. 

When I started my personal one-month “Vegan Challenge” last August, I did it because I was interested in finding the best diet for my lifestyle and was interested in seeing if a plant-based diet would result in more energy, better sleep, mood stability, and faster recovery from training. Although it might be selfish of me, the ethical and political issues (all described here on Wikipedia) were of secondary concern. I didn’t want friends and family to think they couldn’t eat meat or dairy around me and didn’t want to have to be worried about wearing my old leather belt.  And I did not want to start getting into debates around the dinner table about what Bessie the cow looked like before she was turned into your porterhouse steak. And Elizabeth was concerned that I would start using patchouli oil as a substitute for showering.  In the last 10 months, I’ve learned a lot about the personal and societal impacts of a plant-based diet and try to think about those choices from a broader not-just-me perspective.  Finding Ultra has helped me gain even better perspective on my decision to move to a plant-based diet and has given me more tools and inspiration to keep it up.