Royal Mountain Travel Magazine Royal Mountain Travel Magazine Issue 2 | Page 44

Yarsagumba - the “Miracle” Mushroom

Yarsagumba

the “Miracle” mushroom
By Amar B Shrestha

At the same time, it needs to be noted that
Yarsagumba’s popularity in the West is not centuries
old but of more recent times. In the 1990s, the
tabloids went crazy over “Ma Junren’s Army” and
their world record breaking feats. Ma Junren was
a legendary Chinese coach whose women runners
achieved astonishing times in the middle and long
distance races, shattering a number of long standing
world records by significant margins. When asked

for the secret of his fantastic successes, Ma Junren
disclosed that his runners were fed Yarsagumba
three times daily so as to fight the stress involved
in rigorous training in the high mountains. Soon
enough, tabloids globally had latched on to the
scent of a sensational story. The rest, as they say, is
history. And so was born the legend of Yarsagumba,
the “miracle” mushroom