Our main goal at Modmarket is to provide people with real food but it’s important to remember that it’s more of a means than an end.  Real food helps you live your life however you want, it gives you energy and it refreshes you.  That being said, it pains us to think of the McRunner.  On Sunday March 20th, veteran marathon runner Joe D’Amico will run in the Los Angeles Marathon after eating nothing but McDonald’s for 30 days.

He keeps track of all of his meals on his blog and I thought it’d be fun to do a little nutritional math.

McRibs: 0
Angus Burgers: 1 – 750 calories
Filet-o-Fish: 2 – 760 calories
Hotcakes: 75 – 26, 250 calories
Oatmeal: 20 – 5,800 calories
Hamburgers: 20 – 5,000 calories
Chicken Snack Wraps: 20 – 6,800 calories
Chocolate Milk: 8 – 1,360 calories
Fruit & Walnut Salads: 12 – 2,520 calories
Cookies: 55.5 – 8,880 calories

Which comes to 58, 120 calories total.  He gets about 2,152 calories a day which is actually on the low end for marathon runners considering he runs 100+ miles a week but then again, about 1,000 of those come from just the pancakes every day. More alarmingly, he’s consumed over 587 grams of saturated fats (about a pound and a third) and 83, 945 mg of sodium (about 2/5ths of a pound).

D’Amico is doing this for charity and says it’s really not that bad.  We wish him the best of luck and I’ll update this on Sunday if he ends up making it across the finish line.  We would love to have him come to Colorado and eat at Modmarket every day for a month and comparing times.  My guess is a Modmarket fueled runner would be faster than a Big Mac fueled one.

Update:  D’Amico made it across the finish line in 2:36:14 (5:57 a mile, a personal best for him).  Though we may not agree with his methods he raised $29,000 for charity and we think that’s worth a little culinary suffering.

Tags: Los Angeles Marathon, mcdonalds, McRunner, real food