I grew up on what I’d call a better-than-average Standard American Diet. I started cleaning up how I ate at 15, when I followed my older brother and sister’s lead and cut out red meat and fried foods. Through my 20s I gave something up almost every New Year’s: fish one year, then cheese, then dairy, then eggs. By 26 or 27 I was a strict vegan. I tried a high-fat raw diet built on nut butters, avocados and dehydrated crackers, and a high-protein phase that ended with a stress fracture in my tibia and nearly six months off running.

In December 2007 my wife Victoria kept urging me to read a book about a low-fat raw diet built mostly on fruit. I laughed out loud at the sample meals, eight bananas for breakfast and a couple of honeydews for lunch, but I agreed to try it for a week. I started in January 2008 and fell in love with eating that way. It turned out to be one of the biggest turning points of my life.

For my peak running years I ate close to all raw fruit. About 80 to 90 percent of my calories came from fruit and the rest from raw vegetables, and I rarely ate nuts or seeds. My day was built around training. I’d wake up and drink about a liter of water, then maybe juice ten oranges or have some papaya. Then came my 15-mile run to work in Manhattan. For the rest of the day I’d eat one or two kinds of ripe, in-season fruit, usually one at a time: melons, persimmons, mangos, fresh figs, grapes, citrus, berries. Dinner was a huge salad of romaine, tomatoes, carrots, celery, cucumbers and peppers, sometimes with blended mango or a little avocado and lemon as dressing. A late snack might be grapes or a mango.

I needed 4,000 to 6,000 calories a day, so instead of three giant meals I grazed all day. On long training days I leaned on bananas and melons. When I was working on speed I ate more citrus. I kept my fat low because I felt and ran better that way. In my busiest stretches I ran 150 miles a week or more. The one supplement I took was B12, after my levels dropped in the first couple of years.

The social side took some planning. At family gatherings I’d bring my own fruit, and when we went out I’d pick a restaurant with a good salad bar. What I loved most was how simple it all was. It’s how I ate during the best running of my life, and I wrote about it a lot at the time. Those posts, videos and interviews are collected on my Diet History page.