Nutrition on the road - What, How and Why?

It is him, although it wasn't entirely junk...

You lost a lot of weight during your Appalachian Trail run. How much were you eating?
I was on the trail for 13, 14 hours a day at first—and then, later, it became 16, 18 hours a day. Sometimes 20. I was getting less and less sleep, and my metabolism was just raging. I needed to consume 7,000 calories or more a day. A lot of that—around 3,000—of that was in Clif products. Jenny would supplement that with sandwiches or toast drenched in olive oil. Sometimes she’d get me hash browns or greasy home fries from a local diner. Or, after eating pasta with olive oil and vegan sausage, I would down a whole pint of coconut milk ice cream and it didn’t even make a dent.

src: http://www.bonappetit.com/people/article/scott-jurek-ultrarunner-diet

and...

This was especially important during the Appalachian Trail run: “When I was having meals at the end of the day it was about getting extra calories, dumping extra olive oil on pasta, my wife was bringing toast lathered in coconut oil. The carbohydrate is a vehicle for fat, which is what most people who are sedentary and not as active don’t want to do. But I needed to get the maximum amount of calories for the time that I had.”

The biggest challenge with fueling during a run is to keep your food interesting. Even running a regular (tiny) 26.2-mile marathon gets monotonous with gooey gel pack after gooey gel pack. (Especially since Jurek recommends eating 25 grams of carbohydrates every half hour.) So he looks for new flavors, textures, anything that keeps eating during the race from becoming a chore. On some runs he’ll eat bean burritos or pop rice balls rolled with miso paste, but for the Trail run he used Clif Organic Energy Food, which he helped design with Clif Bar. The packs are full of pureed food in flavors like “pizza margherita” and “sweet potato with sea salt,” which for Jurek are a welcome break from sweet goo.

src: http://www.gq.com/story/the-real-life-diet-of-the-ultramarathoner-who-gave-up-meat-and-became-vegan