A vegan triathlete's healthy fuel
Authors and speakers focusing on healthy lifestyles, exercise and diets may be common, but most of them don't have Brendan Brazier's background.
"I'm an athlete," he said. "I did triathlon professionally for seven years. Now I'm talking about how not just to be a good athlete, but how to have more energy and feel good."
Brazier's had a lot of success over the years, competing from 1998-2004 in the Ironman Triathlon series and winning two Canadian 50-kilometre ultramarathon championships, Perhaps even more unusually, he was one of the first professional triathletes to adopt a vegan diet. He said he switched to an all-plant diet for primarily athletic reasons, not ethical or social ones.
"It really was from an athletic standpoint," he said. "I tried different ways of eating to feel better and help my body recover faster, so I tried plant-based. It didn't work well at first, there was a lot of trial and error, but I eventually sorted it out and it became a great nutritional program. I'd recommend it for any athlete."
He adopted the diet long before his professional career began.
"That was when I was 15, in 1990, when I was doing my running trials," he said. "I wanted to be a better athlete, so I was trying different ways of eating, and eventually I tried that one."
Brazier said the change wasn't easy at first, but it paid benefits reasonably quickly.
"Eventually I got it right and started blending together things that were good for me, like complete proteins, iron, Vitamin B12, stuff like that," he said.
Brazier grew up in North Vancouver and still makes his home in the area, but he isn't often around these days thanks to the demands of his speaking career.
"I'm all over the place," he said. "I'm always on the road, but I still consider Vancouver home."
His current speaking tour has brought him back to the Lower Mainland for a short span. He's appeared everywhere from Squamish to White Rock, and gave a presentation at Langley Fine Arts School Wednesday night.
Like many Canadian athletes, a triathlon career wasn't Brazier's first choice, and he didn't even take up running seriously until high school.
"I started running to make me a better hockey player, so I would run before school, and I realized I really enjoyed running, so that became my dominant sport as opposed to hockey."
His path from running to duathlons and triathlons was also unusual.
"I got injured soon after I started running, and I started riding a bike to repair that, and I really enjoyed that," Brazier said. "For a while I did duathlons, which is just running and cycling. They're really small here, but I went to Europe and did that in 1996 for a bit. Triathlon's really the big one, so I had to learn how to swim, so I started swimming."
Brazier began competing professionally in triathlons in 1998. He said swimming was his weakness at first, but he was soon able to overcome it.
"It gave me trouble at first, because I didn't start really early in life, but I got to the point where I was competitive," he said.
He competed successfully in the Ironman Triathlon series from 1998 to 2004, but his decision to leave professional triathlon and become an author and speaker was motivated by unexpected circumstances.
"It was 2004. I was hit by a car when I was cycling, riding up to Whistler," Brazier said. "While I was recovering, I wrote my first book. I self-published the first book."
That first book, The Thrive Diet, was picked up by Penguin and became a best-seller. At the same time, Brazier went back to an earlier dream of making and marketing whole-food meal replacement drinks for vegans, and co-founded Vega with fellow Vancouverite Charles Chang, president of Sequel Naturals. It's turned into a highly successful company and has its products in supplement stores across the country, but Brazier said it almost never came about.
"Vega and my books might not have even started if it hadn't been for the cycling accident," he said. "My life kind of took a different turn then."
He initially thought about trying to return to professional competition, but elected to focus on writing and speaking instead.
"I enjoy both, but I just found I was helping a lot of people," Brazier said. "I just wanted to see it through and keep getting the word out. I do think it is valuable information."
Since the publication of The Thrive Diet, Brazier's fame has grown by leaps and bounds. He spoke to Congress in 2006 about the social and economic benefits of better diets. Recently, he released a new book, Thrive Fitness, focusing more on training. He said it's for more than elite athletes, though.
"It's more about creating a strong, functional, useful body as opposed to one that's just for show," he said. "A lot of the benefits from the exercises are doing them as opposed to the end result, so there's no climax to the program. It's more of a lifestyle-type thing."
In fact, his main concern is the poor health of North American society.
"I wrote in my most recent book that 910,000 Americans die every year due to cardiovascular disease," he said. "Our poor lifestyle and poor diet is primarily due to lack of exercise, and I want to try and help with that."
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