![\"The](\"https:\/\/cdn.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/28\/home-grown-rads.jpg?width=800\")
I\u2019ve always loved animals, being outside, and hard physical labor. As a kid in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., I\u2019d often play farm, pretending to tend cows or mend fences as I was raking leaves or pulling weeds. (I was a weird kid.) And, in a bid to eat more sustainably, Chris and I had already been hunting for and growing our own food in raised garden beds at our suburban rental home in Tennessee for a few years. While considering how to supplement my income, I thought,\u00a0People always need to eat. So I came up with the idea to buy an old, run-down farm, where initially we would grow enough to feed ourselves and a few neighbors. I\u2019d sell eggs and pumpkins at the farmers\u2019 market. Maybe we\u2019d even make goat cheese someday. Chris balked at the idea, but I couldn\u2019t be talked out of it. \u201cThey\u2019re not making any more land,\u201d I said, trying to convince him that it was a good investment.<\/p>\n
I signed my name on the title paperwork, soothing my soul that I was about to embark on something good and just. Yes, I know: swapping journalism for farming\u2014the only other industry that, thanks to tariffs and climate change, is at\u00a0even bigger risk of losing its footing<\/a>\u2014is about as idiotic as grabbing the undercarriage of a bull and hoping milk squirts out. There\u2019s never enough money. There\u2019s too much rain. There\u2019s not enough rain. The tractor or my truck won\u2019t start (cue the country song).<\/p>\n But in doing so, I may have actually conquered another crisis, one I\u2019d given up on fixing years ago. At 34 years old, I finally love my body.<\/p>\n I spent years in a deep embrace with endurance sports. First I ran. Then I did triathlon. Then I raced bikes. Then back to triathlon again. Along the way, I developed a serious eating disorder<\/a>. I\u2019m nearly six feet tall and had ducked under 100 pounds when, at 20, my father staged an intervention. I got treatment. I got better.<\/p>\n Still, I never fully came to terms with my body\u2014the size or the shape or the wonder of it. Post-recovery, at my healthy weight, I\u2019m 145 pounds. In the normal world, no one would call me overweight. But for more than a decade, I didn\u2019t live in the normal world. I lived in the endurance-sports world, where tininess was right up there with godliness.<\/p>\n Producing my own food is the hardest endurance sport I\u2019ve ever done. No level of training compares to the day-after-day-after-day grind of wrestling food from the earth.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/div>\n Running, cycling, and triathlon are sports that celebrate the knife-edge between fitness and thinness\u2014doing the most you can with the very least. Now\u00a0there\u2019s a movement toward\u00a0body positivity<\/a> in triathlon and running. \u201cRunning is a celebration of what I can do, not punishment for what I ate\u201d was a common line, even when I was competing. I probably said it myself. Maybe some of us even meant it. I reckon that some of us also knew there was a tinge of untruth to it. At least that was my experience. When I read things like\u00a0Alberto Contador saying<\/a>\u00a0his favorite thing about retirement is that\u00a0he\u2019s \u201cno longer a slave when it comes to things like diet,\u201d\u00a0I think,\u00a0I hear you, Alberto.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, producing my own food is the hardest endurance sport I\u2019ve ever done. No level of training compares to the day-after-day-after-day grind of wrestling food from the earth. In September, I nearly threw up while stacking 60-pound hay bales in a 110-degree barn. I\u2019m fairly sure I have a hernia from shoveling several thousand pounds<\/a> of gravel. Last summer, when I posted\u00a0a picture of a tiny blackberry in my palm, most of the comments were variants of Holy cow, those calluses.<\/em><\/p>\n Today\u00a0I don\u2019t care so much how my body looks as long as it performs as the tool I need it to be. Brute strength is the thing I crave most. Maybe it helps that I\u2019m not wearing spandex every day. Maybe it helps that I\u2019m no longer playing the who-can-throw-away-most-of-their-dinner\u00a0game that plagued many cycling-team camps that I attended. Maybe it helps that I fought bean beetles and powdery mildew to produce most of the calories on my plate. Or maybe I\u2019m just too tired to care about\u00a0sucking in my belly as I build a fence.<\/p>\n The most astonishing thing about life on a farm is that I\u2019ve stopped thinking about calories altogether. This is quite possibly because I\u2019m too busy to think about them. I\u2019m up at 5 A.M. to exercise the horses. Then I feed our various critters\u2014cats, dogs, aforementioned horses, and\u00a0soon\u00a0chickens and goats. I clean stalls, move manure to our compost pile, and, if I\u2019m lucky, sneak a cup of coffee in somewhere. I sit for a few hours of freelance-writing work and then head back outside. Afternoons and evenings are spent rebuilding barns or pulling dumped concrete blocks out of the stream. Some days I get in a run before it\u2019s time to feed the animals again. And this is just my winter routine. In summer, we also pull\u00a0weeds, pick\u00a0bugs off plants, and harvest\u00a0whatever has come into season.<\/p>\n A year ago, I thought there were good and bad foods. I now think that any food that I can pull from the earth\u2014be it a turnip or a tuber\u2014is a good food. The only bad foods are the things that won\u2019t grow. We\u2019re still a ways away from being fully self-reliant: it\u2019s amazing how hard it is to grow all your own food,\u00a0and how accustomed we\u2019ve become to unseasonal bananas and lettuce in winter. But about half of our produce and proteins\u2014for the latter, we usually hunt for a deer and grow a hearty crop of pinto beans and black-eyed peas\u2014comes from within a square-mile radius of our kitchen.<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/cdn.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/28\/ac-horses.jpg?width=800\")