A Behind the Scenes Look at No Meat Athlete

By: Doug Hay

According to Google, the average lifespan of a blog is just 100 days — just over three months from conception to giving up.

And honestly, it’s not surprising. Having created my own blog, and now having worked with Matt at No Meat Athlete for over six years, I know that maintaining a site people actually want to read is more of a marathon than a Color Run.

Content takes time to do right, communities grow slowly, and finding a way to be compensated for the massive amounts of time and effort…

Well that’s an entirely different subject.

So it’s somewhat of a plant-based miracle that — after beginning as a little side project for Matt to document his journey of going vegetarian and qualifying for Boston — No Meat Athlete has flourished for nearly 10 years…

Thanks in large part to you, our tribe of readers and supporters who believe in what we’re doing here.

I know that if I hadn’t discovered No Meat Athlete when I first went vegetarian, I wouldn’t have had the confidence I did to keep training, and ultimately might never have gone vegan.

You might feel the same way.

But No Meat Athlete looks a lot different than it did 10 years ago (actually, the site itself doesn’t look all that different… but spoiler! An updated site is dropping very, very soon).

What started as Matt’s daily food and lifestyle journal — not sure he’d be thrilled with me calling it that, but hey, I’m the one writing this post 😉 — now consists of a team of seven, a weekly podcast, two published books, countless nutrition and fitness resources, and a community of hundreds of thousands of plant-based athletes.

Instead of just one guy posting on a blog and sharing it with his friends, NMA has grown into a team of people all focused on a single mission: supporting a growing community of plant-based athletes as they set big goals and accomplish amazing things.

How cool is that?

And we have a lot going on. To give you a quick idea of what the current No Meat Athlete looks like, here’s a peek at what was going on today, Thursday, November 15th:

Esther, who you may know as our customer service guru, is working with Matt’s wife Erin to finalize inventory and setup for a brand new line of shirts.
Will is working with the community of Academy members, Pulse, and writing this week’s Pulse newsletter.
Susan is keeping our social media channels active, and nudging Matt and I to do more things like our recent Instagram AMA.
Lead Editor Andrew is editing this very post (or is about to be, anyway 😉
Our partner in Health Made Simple, Sid, is hosting a live Q&A for everyone participating in the first Health Made Simple Challenge, which wraps up this week — great job guys!
Matt Tullman, No Meat Athlete’s business advisor, just had a baby! My best guess is that he’s cleaning up spit-up or trying desperately to figure out which position will keep the baby asleep long enough for him to drink a smoothie.
Matt Frazier, who we all know and love, is working on a few big announcements coming your way over the next week or two.
Aside from this post, I’m focused on our fifth annual Fitness and Nutrition Bundle, set to release next week.

And I’m pretty sure we’re all trying to get in a run, swim, or ride today…

(That’s Esther, Matt Frazier, Susan, Will, Andrew, me, and Matt Tullman.)

But that skips over the biggest driver behind No Meat Athlete:

You, the community. The people really out there showing the world what plant-based badasses can accomplish.

For that, we can’t thank you enough.

In a reflection on nearly 10 years of No Meat Athlete, Matt and I wanted to do something a little different on the podcast. This week we take a trip down memory lane and explore the history of No Meat Athlete and how it has become what it is today.

Click the button below to listen now:

Or:

Click here to download the MP3 file (you may need to right-click and “save link as”)
Subscribe to the show on iTunes or Stitcher so you never miss an episode

If you like what we do at NMA Radio, we’d greatly appreciate it if you’d leave us a rating and review on iTunes. Thank you!