Runner's Smoothie Recipe

So your summer training is going well, and you're logging northwards of 60 miles a week, often in the heat of the day, and when you finish a run the last thing you are thinking about is having a big meal. So you drink several glasses of ice water, or maybe Gatorade, and that's all well and good. However, you need more than sugar to replenish what you've lost. When do you get it? At your next big meal?

And you said you're a vegetarian? Well, so am I! And I know that it takes a good bit of planning to get the necessary protein and iron into your diet.

But... for an endurance athlete, replacing what you've lost and getting what you need is essential to actually benefiting from all that training. If you don't have the right stuff in your diet -- and again, for vegetarians this is especially true -- you are on a path to long-term depletion. The worst thing is, the depletion (of iron stores, for example) happens so gradually that you won't even notice it. It might not be for several months, and even then you might only notice that you've had a few bad races, and you don't feel much energy, and training seems harder, and the results that you've hoped for and deserve aren't there.

I hope this doesn't happen to you, but unfortunately, it did happen to me my senior year of cross-country. By then I had been a vegetarian for over two years, had donated blood, and done a lot of running over the summer. But I wasn't better than the year before, I was slower and less competitive. I won't go through the whole story -- maybe another time, but it took me a long time to get right again, a long time of taking iron supplements, eating more iron-rich food, and recovering.

Trust me, it's far better not to be depleted in the first place! So, as a public service and by popular demand, I'll share my anti-depletion, vegetarian-approved smoothie recipe. When I'm running a lot, I try to have these after long runs or very hard efforts, and at least three times a week no matter what.

Here it is:

1 cup plain low-fat yogurt
1/2 cup peach juice
1/2 cup orange juice
1 medium banana
4 oz. frozen strawberries
1 oz frozen blueberries
24g protein powder*

I usually add all of above ingredients except the protein powder and blend it for several seconds, then add the protein powder last and blend some more. With some powders it seems to dissolve better this way.

* There are several good vegetarian protein powders available at Shaw's, Whole Foods, etc. You might need to ask someone where to find them, though.

If you make the above recipe using the Wild Harvest brand of vegetarian protein powder, you'll have about 24 oz. of liquid, containing the following:

33g protein (50% RDA)
7.3mg iron (40% RDA)
4.4g potassium (120% RDA)
500 calories

If drinking 24 oz of the stuff is too much, share it with your family. It's good-enough tasting that you should have no trouble getting others interested. Either way, this is a great start to getting the nutrients that you need to recover from your long or hard run. You still need to eat well the rest of the day, but you are far more likely to get enough protein and iron with this as a start.