Pushing the Envelope at Raw Foods Foods Sports Camp

(Integrative Medicine) — Rocky Balboa sucking in eggs in preparation for his epic battle with Apollo Creed... Weight lifting behemoths shoveling in protein bars...Extreme sports enthusiasts wolfing down whale fat: These are a few of the images that come to mind when one thinks of jocks in training.

Certainly not munching on celery stalks, avocado wedges, tangerine slices, and tomatoes. But platters of these veggies appeared at the kickoff dinner of a week-long sports and exercise program run by Doug Graham, a wiry 50-year-old Florida chiropractor-turned sports guru. The hors d’oeuvres, I thought, hopefully. Ahem... pass the biscuits, please...?

Except, there were no biscuits. And, it turned out, there was no dinner — other than, of course, celery stalks, avocado wedges, tangerine slices, and tomatoes.

But none of those seated around the table in this imposing nine-room rented house on the shore of Virginia Beach seemed particularly surprised. After all, this wasRaw Foods Sports Camp. Graham sat at the head of the table, flanked by the piles of organic veggies and fruits and a support staff that included a physical therapist, a masseur and a Brightfield microscopist. Every day for the next week, from sunrise to sunset, he would lead about a dozen of us"campers" in vigorous workout sessions designed to push the limits of our endurance.

Dragging myself out of bed in order to be on time for the initial class at 6 a.m. sharp turned out to be the easy part. The workout sessions became increasingly demanding, with campers expected to try everything from trampolining to standing on their hands.

Integral to the training program, of course, was the food, which consisted exclusively of raw organic vegetables and fruit.

Chowing down daily on such Spartan fare might seem pretty surreal, goofy, even, to Margaret and Mitchell Mainstream. But not to those at "camp," in addition to the score or two of world-class athletes who have bitten into Graham’s theory that athletic training sustained by a diet of raw food — all raw all the time — is the most effective way for athletes to train.

I buy into the argument that cooking destroys enzymes, but I’m no zealot. So the idea of fueling a week’s worth of training on the likes of tangerines and tomatoes, pears and persimmons raised a red flag.

It would be only a matter of time before I began to lust for a well-prepared cooked meal, something akin, say, to the seven-course monuments to culinary excellence served nightly during my recent cycling trip through Southern France, or perhaps the sumptuous, candle-lit feasts that greet upscale travelers on safari in Africa in their luxury tents, lions roaring in the background.

The youngest camper, 13, became my instant soul mate after tossing out a line about wanting to go to Wendy’s. No one laughed.

But what was funny about running ourselves ragged, two hours at a time, three times a day, on a diet of rabbit food? It was all raw fare, it turned out, that would enable us to do precisely that.

Graham believes that an exclusively raw diet made up of 80 percent carbohydrates, 10 percent protein, and ten percent fat packs the most wallop for athletes or anyone else interested in good health.Since migrating to uncooked food in the 1970s, he’s served as his own guinea pig. For the past 12 years, he’s remained "100 percent raw."

Critics argue that entirely raw diets lack vital nutrients and could cause health problems. But Graham has continued to gain stature in health circles, as well as clients that have included dozens of Olympians, among them Martina Navritolova, NBA veteran Ronnie Grandison, bowler Bruce Hamilton, and Kenny Kroes, holder of 15 individual swimming records and 15 first-time swimming records. While eating is at the core of raw doctrine, simplicity also plays a big role. There is no state-of-the-art gym equipment, for example, in fact, no equipment, period, other than a large trampoline, several small ones, and balls of all sizes.

And Graham barks out no military-style commands. Instead, he encourages clowning around and laughter, even when campers collapse in embarrassing heaps while attempting to mount medicine balls or stand on their heads. Even pranks are fine. One night, I used a cell phone and a false accent to present a fellow camper with a phony telemarketing offer to buy protected wild horses that roam the beaches of Virginia and Maryland.

The physical part of the program is rounded out with lectures on health and nutrition by Roz Gruben, a lecturer at Middlesex University, who uses the metaphorical language of bedtime stories to explain how an entirely raw vegan diet contributes to good body mechanics and cardio-respiratory fitness. Both she and Graham contend that misinformation disseminated by pharmaceutical and other special interests prevents more people from embarking on an all raw diet.

They spout one-liners designed to neutralize the social stigma of going totally raw (I.e. "The lighter your digestive load, the better you’re able to deal with emotional shortcomings... " "Those who eat a standard diet anesthetize themselves emotionally;" and "people who don’t conform to a mass diet sometimes fear losing the approval of those who have given them their identity)."

This is all part of a "new vocabulary," Graham says, for his game plan to alter the goal posts of food consumption, and move his message away from the radical edge and into the mainstream.

This might apply to Martina Navritilova and Kenny Kroes. But was it practical for ordinary people like me?

Over the years, I have managed to wean myself off meat and genuinely appreciate the healthful benefits of a vegetarian diet. By most accounts I am reasonably fit.

But I sometimes undermine my healthy side with cooked fare, and seductive no-noes such as chocolate, peanut butter and, God forbid, ice cream.

Plus, I enjoy an occasional piece or two of bread, which, it turns out, Dr. Graham, has panned along with cereals) in Grain Damage, one of his four books on health and nutrition.Oh well.

How could an average guy who balances the eight or 10 hours a day he spends glued to a computer screen with moderate biking, occasional running, and a trip to the gym once a week if he’s lucky survive one hard workout after another on a diet that doesn’t go much beyond mangoes and melons, grapes and greens?Yo dude! What was I, nuts? (which, by the way, aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, according to Graham, who claims, for example, that the process of dehydrating almonds curtails the nutritional value of the seeds). Hey, one of those at camp I’m supposed to compete against is Doug Dickerson, who in 1988 briefly held the world record for the men’s indoors 300-meter race. He is training for the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece.H-e-l-l-l-o? Anybody home?

Benign stretching and yoga techniques that were to dominate the early morning sessions were no sweat. But standing on an exercise ball, let alone my hands? And wasn’t cart wheeling strictly for female cheerleaders with bodies the breadth of toothpicks and the flexibility of rubber bands?

How could I expect to survive hour after hour of obstacle courses, trampolining, and slogging through games of beach football against Dickerson and Co. on rabbit food? For just one day, never mind six?

Under ordinary circumstances, I couldn’t.

But in the extraordinarily supportive world of Raw Food Sports Camp, with its emphasis on spirituality, bonding, and efforts to awaken the inner child, I began to see new possibilities. As the days passed, the food seemed better tasting. Soon, I lost my craving for substitutes, and found myself full of energy.

I became further inspired by the dexterity of Graham, who honed his athletic skills while attending six salad day summer sports camps in West Long Branch, N.J. where he grew up. Now, at the half century mark, he can still make his chiseled body do things that would leave Joe Six Packs half his age slack-jawed and bug-eyed.

Graham conducted his first Raw Foods Sports Camp four years ago after working as a chiropractor and running a health center in the Florida Keys that attracted the sick but also a smattering of local athletes. From the beginning, he avoided using institutional workout equipment typically found in mainstream gyms, focusing instead on childhood games such as tag, hide and seek, jump rope, and even skipping.

"The fact that so many adults watch television, listen to music or read magazines while at the gym makes it clear that they don’t enjoy exercising," he said."Do you ever notice how hard children try to win when they play games? That’s because they’re having fun.There’s no reason why adults can’t also have fun when they exercise, and get a good workout, too." But questions continue to arise about an all-raw diet, even from the true believers at camp.

What, for example, do raw foodists do about vitamin B-12?("Our bodies make all that we need," Graham said)

How do they get enough protein?("Raw organic fruits and vegetables provide enough.")

What’s wrong with supplements?("The human body requires no supplements, no energy boosters, and certainly no drugs. Together with a steady diet of exercise, it’s perfectly capable of taking care of itself.")

Graham insists that he is simply following nature’s way, and that it is the mainstream that has become deficient in its dietary habits. "Eating the wrong food makes people fat, causes cancer, and reduces the quality of life," he said simply. "Eating the right food does not."

Dickerson, 38, agrees. He turned to a raw diet in order to compete better with other runners, 80 percent of whom he claims used steroids in 1988 when he broke the world record for the men’s indoor 300-meter race.

Dickerson recently began assisting at Graham’s camps. He hopes that an all-raw diet will enable him to become he first Olympic track and field athlete older than 40.

One of the campers, Virginia Beach naturopath Dr. Deborah Wood, is so sold on Graham’s program that she enrolled herself, her two daughters, and future son-in-law in the Virginia Beach camp.But she says that trying to convince people to change their eating habits has been an uphill battle, even among members of her own family.

Wood’s 13-year-old daughter, Nicole, took to the activities at sports camp with, well, relish, performing an exemplary backstretch that outclassed the backstretches of everyone else.

But the teenager seemed more interested in watching The Simpsons than attending the lectures that rounded out the program.Once she offered me some Fritos that she smuggled into camp. Wood can’t even persuade her own husband to make changes in his diet that, she claims, could reverse the leukemia that is slowly killing him."He’s a corporate guy and it’s hard for him to see any good coming from something that’s embraced by people he thinks all wear dreadlocks," she said.

At the Virginia Beach camp, not a long hair was to be found (at least among the males), only those such as clean-cut Dave Rodenbucher, an athletic masseur from Akron, Ohio, who, to the chagrin of his extended, third-generation farming family, gave up cattle ranching and went raw. He and his wife plan to use their land to develop an organic vineyard.

Bruce Brazis, an Arizona engineer, became sold on eating uncooked fare after a stint at sports camp in September. He has since trained as a "Brightfield microscopist" and recently signed on with Graham to monitor the blood work of campers (my own blood was marginally better at the end of the week, I was told).

But for me the proof of the pudding (in this case, a sapote, a rich, softball-sized chocolate colored fruit grown in Florida) was whether eating a raw diet for a solid week would improve an average person’s athletic performance.

It didn’t for every participant: One camper dropped out of the exercise program because of complications with detoxifying, while another suffered from a bad cold that prevented her full participation. On the final day of camp, pain in my lower back kept me from attempting the most demanding tasks.

But overall I did surprisingly well. Normally, I require a day or two to recover after a hard workout and rarely visit my gym two days in a row. But at sports camp I comleted every exercise session, six hours a day for six days, experiencing only minor muscle soreness and, as a result of a vigorous game of “crab ball,” rug burns on my knees. My success in outperforming younger, more accomplished athletes, if only in aerobics and football scrimmaging, easily made up for my mild discomfort.

Don’t get me wrong: Raw foods sports camp by no means catapulted me into the vaunted ranks of world-class jocks. To be sure, Dickerson easily breezed past the eight of us who teamed up to relay race 300 meters against him.

And I collapsed into many-an-embarrassing heap while attempting to cartwheel, juggle, stand on my hands or atop a medicine ball.

But the fact that I managed to try such acrobatic tasks for the first time personally represented something of an Olympian breakthrough.

After sports camp, I didn’t beeline for Wendy’s.

Although I soon reverted to some old eating habits and fishing for excuses not to go to the gym, I found myself within site of a new set of goal posts.