Trishul Cherns, a 66-year-old who won a 142.5 miles 48-hour ultramarathon in Massachusetts, is a plant-based athlete. As part of the eighth edition of the Notchview Ultra, the event Cherns won started on 8th July 2023, and the 32 participants had to endure heat, high humidity, and nearly 24 hours of rain during their races.
Cherns, who is from Hamilton, Canada, but now lives in New York, has a running career that spans more than four decades. He has raced more than 46,000 miles in races with some single events covering 1,000 miles. He has broken more than 110 Canadian ultrarunning records, and in 2021, he finished his 300th ultramarathon.
In a new interview with Canadian Running, Cherns said, “My success definitely comes from my diet. I’m a vegan, and that’s an anti-inflammatory diet. I’m trying to prevent inflammation in my body because these are stressful events, so I’m trying to make it as easy as possible… I still feel 30 inside, and I’m beating guys that are 20, 30, 40 years younger than me. So I think the message is, no matter what your age is, keep going and keep doing what you’re doing…I want to keep pushing my goals so that running is all a new adventure for me.”
Vegan and plant-based marathon runners are having lots of success all over the world, showing how this diet is ideal for endurance sports. For instance, in July 2023, the American vegan runner Harvey Lewis completed his 12th consecutive Badwater Ultramarathon just two weeks after breaking his own US record in Last Survivor racing with a 375-mile run. In April, vegan athlete Lisa Gawthorne won the gold medal for Britain at the European Duathlon Championships. In March, Damian Hall, another plant-based runner, won the 268 miles 2023 ultramarathon The Spine Race, which crosses the Pennine mountain range in the north of England. For decades, the British vegan runner Fiona Oakes has been spreading the vegan message breaking several marathon records while looking after animals in need in her animal sanctuary in England.
