Agriculture Reference
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yet average, performance. What I found surprised me: the average
athlete's program differed very little from the elite's.
If training discrepancies were minimal and natural talent can
only get you so far so fast, what caused some athletes to pull out
ahead of the pack?
The most significant difference I found between the upper
echelon of elites and the moderately performing athletes had noth-
ing to do with training; it was all about recovery. Breakthrough per-
formances are hinged on the rate at which the body recovers from
physical training—which makes sense. Training isn't much more
than breaking down muscle tissue, so it stands to reason that the
athletes who can restore theirs the quickest will have the advan-
tage by being able to schedule more workouts closer together.
Over just a few short months, that extra training will translate into
a significant performance gain. Realizing this, recovery became my
focus.
As surprised as I was to discover that there were few differences
in training routines between the best and the average athlete,
I was even more so when I learned that diet has the single greatest
impact on recovery: food choices can account for up to 80 percent
of the total recovery process. If cleaning up my diet was a principal
component to becoming a professional athlete, as I speculated it
might be, I needed to learn more. With this newfound apprecia-
tion for diet, I decided to take mine more seriously and, for the first
time, developed an increasingly growing interest in health and
nutrition.
In those early years, I experimented with many different nutri-
tional philosophies, ticking them off as I methodically continued
my search for the diet that would give me the results I was look-
ing for. At long last, I tried a purely plant-based diet. Right from
the outset, my meat-, egg-, and dairy-free diet was unexpectedly
met with extraordinary resistance by friends, coaches, and train-
