The Best Posts and Podcasts in 10 Years of No Meat Athlete

By: Matt Frazier

It’s a weird feeling to turn the page on 10 years and begin the next decade, but it’s time — today is the last day of what’s been an emotional week of celebrating.

To wrap up the week, I’ve compiled a list of the very best blog posts and podcast episodes we’ve ever made — plus a look back (featuring some cringe-worthy screenshots) at the evolution of NMA and the running carrot.

Let’s start with the pictures…

In the days after I came up with the idea for No Meat Athlete, I asked my sister, Christine, to help me come up with a logo.

She started here:

And eventually, got here:

Then tweaked it a little:

The running carrot is wearing a race bib

And soon, the famous Microsoft Paint carrot was born:

Finally, a few months later, the carrot as we know him arrived:

Computerized image of No Meat Athlete running carrot

And in 2015, we added a non-running carrot to the mix (part of the modern logo we use that was designed by Rainmaker Creative), with plans to eventually build the site around this new design:

But even though we started using the modern carrot on images and shirts, the running carrot stuck around on the website for a long time, disappearing from the header only recently.

As for the site? It started out on wordpress.com, like this:

Image of No Meat Athlete's first blog post and web page

(It didn’t occur to me to put images in blog posts until someone mentioned the idea in a comment on one of the early posts!)

After a few weeks, when I was convinced the idea had legs, I forked over $85 and moved to a self-hosted site:

(Which actually looked slightly better than it does here; archive.org isn’t pulling the header image files anymore.)

Then, my first custom header, done by my friend Ryan to my exacting standards. Those are my legs running. And those cow-spotted letters? I think I was aiming for ironic, but nine years later I see that I missed.

Check out this short-lived, sort-of-3D version of the running carrot though — I forgot all about that guy!

(This shot looks worse than it actually did; the formatting of the blog is messed up here when archive.org pulls it. That sprouts picture, though, I take the blame for that one.)

And in late 2010, I switched to a fully-custom design (done by Charfish) that would last for eight years:

For the past 3 years or so, the site has looked more or less like this:

The No Meat Athlete site through the mid 20-teens

Then finally, earlier this year, we launched the current site design (with a dedicated homepage), all of which was done by Rainmaker Creative, incorporating the logos, fonts, and brand colors that they came up for us a few years earlier.

The Best Posts of the First Decade of No Meat Athlete

There are nearly 1,000 published posts and pages on No Meat Athlete. While you could start at the beginning and read them all… please, spare yourself. There’s some gold in the early days (I actually really like the writing style back then, when I was less afraid of wordiness and bad jokes), but there’s a lot to sort through to find it.

But for best posts we’ve published in 10 years, I give you this new, updated list. The greatest hits of the first decade of No Meat Athlete, grouped by broad category.