I’m a vegan sportsperson. I regularly play a variety of sports and I run, sometimes competitively, and have done since I was a child, and I coach sport at a national level to both kids and adults, and work in a national sports body at a board level. Barely a waking hour passes when I am not playing sport or coaching, or thinking, talking, writing or reading about, or organizing or watching sport.
Since I’ve been vegan my sporting performances have improved – most emphatically in athletics. As I get older, when logic dictates that I should be slowing down, I’m running further and faster than before. But performance is one thing; recovery is another, and how quickly I recover from an endurance event – a marathon, for example, as a vegan, compared to when I was a non-vegan – is out of this world. As a vegan, I’m fine the very next day, ready to run again after resting for just 24 hours. As a vegan I can run two marathons in the space of a week, something I could never have done as a non-vegan.
I enter endurance events because I like proving to doubters that it is every bit as possible to perform well as a vegan as it is as a non-vegan. Inevitably, the questions come. If someone asks about how it is to be a vegan sportsperson, I usually respond that I don’t know – and they eventually put two and two together and work out that my performance speaks for itself. I want them to think that if he could do it, then so too can they. When we go out to eat as a team, I’m noticing increasingly more team members are eating vegan meals.
The kids that I coach ask questions too, and I don’t hold back on telling them what I think, because I want to be a positive influence in their lives. Once a kid came to a coaching session eating a KFC burger. “Get that crap out of my sight,” I told him. “It’s not cool, clever, or funny. It’s not okay to eat (or use) animals. They have brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers. How would you like it?” Children often understand these issues clearer and are more open, because they haven’t been subjected to the years of detrimental effects of advertising and other pressures that adults undergo.
Special thanks to Butterflies Katz for including this in her compelling essay collection highlighting diversity amongst vegans:
I’M A VEGAN: One Movement, Many Voices.
