Robin Arzón’s Ultramarathon Training Runs Entirely on Plants

Robin Arzón knows how to hustle. As an ultramarathoner, a bestselling author, a toy-line creator, a mom of two, and the head instructor and vice president of fitness programming at Peloton, she stays booked and busy, helping people step into stronger (sweatier) versions of themselves. This becomes even more impressive when you learn she’s done it all on plants. “I’ve been plant-based for over a decade,” Arzón tells POPSUGAR. “This is genuinely how I put food into my body, so I can energize throughout my day and hit the multiple points of my hustle.”

Arzón can still recall the day she decided to make the change. “I was in the bodega with my little tray getting my salad in New York City. They plop everything on. And I just remember looking at some of the stuff that I normally got and I was like . . . ‘This isn’t hitting today.'” Inspired by her bodega lunch, Arzón started researching appetizing plant-based options, eventually landing on a salad that soft-launched the rest of her plant-based diet. “I started adding chickpeas, and I started adding lentils and nuts and avocados and things that were actually sustaining my energy throughout the day better,” she says.

Now, with years of plant-based experience under her belt, Arzón says eating more plants is an asset to her training. “I really believe that I recover faster and I have more energy because of my diet,” she says. “I’m over 10 years in and running many marathons, ultramarathons, training two to three hours a day, strength training. Obviously, all the work I do at Peloton is pretty robust. And the reality is that I haven’t looked back.”

For those wanting to join her on the “plant-hustler” journey, Arzón suggests testing it out meal by meal. “For me, I started with lunch. I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to make my lunch plant-based today.’ And then once I had one meal that I knew I liked, then I just rinse and repeat.”

To help more people reap the benefits of a plant-based diet, Arzón partnered with Silk to create the Feel Planty Good Challenge, working with celebrities like actor Vanessa Hudgens and NFL star Saquon Barkley to create seven days of breakfasts using Silk’s plant-based ingredients. “I love my recipe. The Mean Green Matcha Machine is incredible,” she says about her healthy breakfast smoothie. “I’m not a coffee girly. I’m a matcha girly. So I wanted something with some caffeine,” Arzón says (not to mention a whole lot of fiber, healthy fats, and vitamin C).

“I do smoothies every day, but I have breakfast in two parts and lunch in two parts. So I’ll drink half my smoothie, then the other half when I’m working out, and then after my first workout of the day, sometimes I’ll do a savory oatmeal, or a savory bean burrito type of tofu scramble,” she explains. Once her workouts are officially over for the day, she brings back her signature salad, packed with lots of raw veggies.

It takes discipline to live like Arzón, which she says is a critical aspect of self-care. “I’m very grateful that a lot of the conversation around self-love and self-care is so omnipresent, but discipline and routine is actually self-love,” she says. “I still approach things from a day-one mentality. And that’s putting priorities first. It’s making the decision today that is going to be kinder to my future self.”