Natural Born Heroes: How a Daring Band of Misfits Mastered the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance

by Christopher McDougall

  “We saw young people that a couple of weeks ago were swearing at them in the classroom, now they’re nodding and saying, ‘Yes, Dan. Yes, Forrest,’ ” says Cory Wharton-Malcolm, the Westminster sports development officer. “To be able to watch that change over a period of weeks is amazing.” The police were even more dumbfounded. “Metropolitan Police came back and said crime among that age group had dropped 69 percent, which was a mind-blowing stat,” Dan says. Sixty-nine percent! “That was a huge validation that this actually works.”

  Dan felt a change coming over himself as well. “Until then, I was about improving myself. Now I thought, Right. Let’s see how many people we can reach and how far we can take it.”

  —

  Dan’s next frontier arrived in the form of a single mom playing wing-man for her nervous cousin. Shirley Darlington was sixteen when she dropped out of high school to help support her family after her father died, and nineteen when she had a baby of her own. Shirley knew she’d boxed herself into a bleak future, so she began scrambling for a way out. She sold sneakers by day while getting her high school degree at night, then began university studies while creating a job for herself with the health council as a mentor for other teen moms. “I had to grow up fast,” she explains. “I was working full-time and caring for an infant. I didn’t have time to play.” She had two other reasons for begging off when her cousin was too shy to go to Parkour alone: “Never heard of it” and “God, I haven’t exercised since PE class in school five years ago.”

  Shirley eventually caved—and regretted it. She and her cousin arrived for the Westminster class and found themselves alone in a sea of lads pulling themselves over brick walls twice as high as their heads. But the heckling and the babying they expected never came. When Shirley and her cousin struggled with a drill, two of the lads who’d already finished silently circled back and completed it by their side. “There’s no written code for Parkour, but pretty much everywhere you find the same principles,” Dan says. “At some point, even the strongest person freezes on a jump. It teaches you humility and reminds you where you came from.” That’s why no one ever finishes a challenge alone. “Even from the beginning, with the Yamakasi,” Dan points out, “Parkour was always about community.”

  Dan began having his own visionary breakthrough. Night after night, he watched Shirley show up for class even though she was weak and clumsy and usually exhausted from work and class and pre-dawn baby feedings. For two years, Shirley struggled to do her first pull-up. “She used to just hang from the bar,” Dan says. “She’d pull and pull and she wouldn’t move one centimeter.” But she continued showing up and grabbing for the bar until a year later, Shirley nailed her first “muscle-up”—a challenging and essential Parkour maneuver in which you continue the pull-up until you’re waist high on the bar and can vault yourself on top. By her fifth year, Shirley was not only outperforming the men, like a modern-day Atalanta—she’d become the one circling back to help struggling lads. The real obstacle wasn’t strength, she discovered; it was trust. “I never knew what my body could do, so it took a long time to build the confidence to throw my full weight into a movement,” Shirley says. “Once I did, it changed everything.”

  —

  It’s great we’re winning over young guys and thinning out the predators, Dan thought as he watched Shirley’s transformation. But what if we also empowered everyone else? In 2005, only five women in the world practiced Parkour, which Dan found insane. “The time has come for all of us, men and women alike, to adapt to the world we now live in,” Dan believes. By the year 2050, after all, six of every seven people on the planet will live in a city. “We have to shape our training to fit our lifestyle,” Dan says. “We’re no longer surrounded by trees, so we have to learn to climb walls.”

  Dan began playing with an idea: What if women discovered they could be just as strong in the city as they were in the wild? What if they knew they could climb, run, jump, and adapt as powerfully as any man? Dan couldn’t really make the case himself, being a man. But he knew someone who could.

  On the Thursday morning I arrived in London, my phone pinged with a message from Shirley:

  Kilburn tube station, 7 pm.

  I got there ten minutes early, but about twenty women were already warming up, including the British movie actress Christina Chong and her sister Lizzi, a professional dancer. We set off at a jog, arriving about a half-mile later at a cement courtyard in the middle of a high-rise housing project. Shirley had us line up at the top of a long, zigzagging access ramp and drop to all fours. We monkey-walked on hands and feet about forty yards to the bottom, then bunny-hopped up the stairs and did it again backwards; then crab style; then squat-hopping, each time with a new twist and a push-up between circuits.

  By the thirteenth loop, my hands were cement-scuffed and my head was spinning from being at knee height for so long, but the parade of hopping, bear-crawling, push-upping women showed no sign of slowing. I looked around for Shirley, but she’d disappeared into our midst. “The best Parkour coaches are invisible,” Dan told me. “They get you started, then get out of the way.” I spotted her again when three men took a seat on the wall and began sharing a smoke and loud comments on the women’s bodies. Shirley quietly peeled off from the circuit and trotted over to a swingset. She leaped for the crossbar, and in a blur somehow ended up squatting on top. It’s become her signature move, and it’s a showstopper.

  Not long ago, she’d teamed up with Felicity “Fizz” Hood and Anne-Therese “Annty” Marais for an extraordinary YouTube clip called “Movement of 3.” In little more than two minutes, the three cat-leap up and over a seven-foot wall, land precision jumps on two-inch guardrails, execute a hand-to-hand traverse along a rooftop railing, and then Annty and Fizz catapult themselves through a swingset while the single mom who couldn’t do a pull-up when she began Parkour squats on the bar above their heads, perfectly balanced while blowing soap bubbles.

  This time, Shirley lowers herself from the bar with such slow grace and power that the three mopes on the wall shove their cigarettes in their mouths so their hands are free to applaud.

  Moving on! Shirley’s tribe is heading out, so I have to sling my bag on my back in a hurry and sprint to catch up. For the next two hours, North West London is our playground. Shirley leads us to metal benches, where we practice diving into shoulder rolls and popping back up on a dead run. She finds a beaut of a wall where we work on running arm jumps: running straight up the bricks, basically, and grabbing for the top of the wall, and hoisting ourselves up when momentum dies and gravity takes over. Well after dark, we’re all clinging to a railing as we traverse a cement wall in a hanging squat. My feet are slipping and I’m in danger of dropping off when Lizzi Chong tucks in beside me. “Get your knees higher,” she says. “You’re relying on your arms, but this is about legs.”

  Step by step, we work our way to the end, then drop to all fours and bear-crawl on hands and feet back to the beginning; press out our fortieth or so push-up of the night; and get ready for another loop. I try to thank Lizzi for the help, but she waves me off. “I needed a hand to hold when I started because I thought it was too dangerous,” she said. “If I break an ankle, that’s my career.” But after her first class, she was hooked. “I could see the dance in it. The flow, the rhythms, the strength and danger. You’re always on the edge of fear, because your body senses it can do more than your mind will let it.”

  By the time Shirley cuts us loose for the night, I never want to do Parkour again and can’t wait to come back. I didn’t just run and climb all over North West London; I still had its cement grit deep under my fingernails. This must be what George Psychoundakis meant when he said a true Cretan citizen is a dromeus, a runner, I thought. Someone who can handle any obstacle and circle his hometown like a guardian spirit.

  CHAPTER 21

  “WE’RE HEADING into ‘Evaders Country,’ ” Chris called back, leading us off the crags and across some jagged stone flats towar
d the Samaría Gorge: baddest of the badlands. “It’s where a lot of Allied soldiers hid after they were left behind by the evacuation.”

  Samaría is a thunderbolt in stone, a thin gash that splits two rock towers and zigzags eleven miles upward from the beach until it crests on a grassy mountain plateau. It’s a terrific place to hide, because the walls are honeycombed with caverns; tuck inside one and dislodging you could be lethal. No one can get down to you from above, and coming up from below means crossing your kill zone. During the war, the Gorge became a free-for-all zone for Evaders, who could see pursuers coming from miles away and scamper down to the beach whenever they heard rumors of a rescue boat, and the “wind boys”—Cretan desperadoes whose only allegiance was to their own cutthroat gang.

  George had his own run-in with the wind boys while he and another guerrilla were crossing the Gorge with a message for the Resistance. George played it cool, bantering with them cautiously from halfway behind a boulder while covering them with the pistol in his pocket, but his partner ran for it. The wind boys caught him with a rifle shot, and in the turmoil George vanished among the rocks and slipped off. Miraculously, George found his partner the next day, passed out miles away from a bullet wound through his arm. George got him to a guerrillas’ den, then pushed on with his mission.

  The White brothers and I slept at the base of the Gorge, but not for long. By 3 A.M. we were up and setting off for the trailhead. Climbing the Gorge is daunting on a good day, especially when you tilt your head way back and realize you’ll be walking through those clouds overhead and still be a good way from the top. We took another look at the clouds, glowing in a milky moon. If they opened up, we were in trouble; we’d be pinned in a water chute where going back down would be as risky as pushing on up.

  “It had to be terrifying for the Germans,” Pete mused. “Jumping out of a plane over an island full of born-murderers who all hate you. Survive that, and they send you into this place”—he jerked his head toward the rain-forest foliage around the dark trail—“to hunt men who are better at hunting you.”

  Lovely. I wasn’t surprised by the scope of Pete’s empathy—his chosen career, after all, is nurturing plants and teaching learning-disabled adults to create with their hands—but it was eerie to suddenly be reminded how horrifying this wilderness used to be. It’s hard not to feel tiny and trapped at the bottom of a canyon, especially when you begin to sense all the invisible eyes once hidden by its caves and gnarled trees. The Gorge still has that feeling of menace and evil opportunity, at least until the sun comes up. By midmorning we were bumping into a few downhill hikers, and then a merry stream. Samaría has become a popular tourist route, but only in one direction: groups are dropped off at the top by bus, then picked up at the bottom by ferry and hauled back to their beach hotels.

  Heading up, we were alone. We crested the trail by early afternoon, climbing out of the woods into a freezing mountain wind and a light patter of rain. We took a breather before pushing on to Lakki, a village somewhere on the far side of the grassy Omalos Plateau. As we tore into sardines and chunks of bread from our packs, we watched a man snipping something by the side of the road and shoving it into a blue plastic grocery bag. Pete walked over for a closer look, and discovered one of the special weapons of the Cretan Resistance.

  “It’s nasturtium,” Pete reported back: an orange weed with tasty leaves and flowers. Like most places, Crete has weeds growing in every stony crack; but unlike most places, Cretans devour them. Weeds of all stripe—dandelion, purslane, chicory, sorrel—are picked and braised and tossed together in a peppery mix called horta. With a citrusy squirt of lemon and a little olive oil for fat and flavor, horta is a nutritional powerhouse of iron, calcium, omega-3 fatty acids, plus an alphabet soup of vitamins. For a man on the run, it was a life saver; superfood fixin’s were nearly everywhere, nearly any time, and always fresh and delicious.

  Unless you had Paddy’s palate, that is. “He hated horta,” says Artemis Cooper—but he had to respect it.

  —

  Oddly, I’d discovered a living handbook of the ancient Cretan eating arts in the form of a ballerina prowling Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. When she’s not teaching dance in Manhattan or choreographing new pieces, Leda Meredith likes to walk the park in both winter and summer and stuff her backpack with foraged findings: garlic mustard and pepper grass, lemony sorrel and asparagus-like pokeberry shoots, gummy mallow leaf and tangy lamb’s-quarter and delectable ginkgo—yes, ginkgo, those horrific gooey globules that litter city sidewalks every spring and stink up the bottom of your shoes.

  “I have to race Koreans for the ginkgo,” Leda mentioned when we set off into the park one September morning. “If I’m too slow, all I’ll find is the remains where they field-dressed a pile. You take the fruit, squeeze off the yellow squishy part, and save the kernels for roasting. Delicious.” I figured the early autumn cold snap meant we’d come home empty-handed, but within four feet Leda had already spotted prey. “Lamb’s-quarter!” she exulted, easing a leafy clump out of the lawn. She singled out a strand and pointed to the powdery coating on the arrowhead leaves.

  “They look dusty, right? That’s your identifier.”

  “I’ve seen this all over every lawn I’ve ever mowed,” I said. “It’s edible?”

  “It’s like kale and chard,” Leda said. “It sells for seven-fifty a pound in the Park Slope Coop, but guess what? It’s growing in the sidewalk right out front.” Leda squatted and came up with a fistful of another weed I’d seen forever. She pointed out its tiny pink flowers and the dark smudge on a slender droopy leaf which resembles the smudge of an inky thumb. “Lady’s Thumb. It’s a little bitter, but chop it into a salad with some sorrel and it’s wonderful. It’s from the buckwheat family, so it’s packed with nutrients.”

  As a girl, Leda learned the art of foraging from her Greek immigrant family in San Francisco. Leda’s mother was a ballerina with a Los Angeles ballet company, so Leda was raised mostly by her grandmother. “Every spring, there came a moment when Yia-Yia Lopi, my great-grandmother, stubbed out her Kool menthol cigarette and declared that it was the right day to gather horta in the park,” Leda explains. “The timing had to be just right: too soon and the leaves would be too small, too late and they’d be too bitter. Yia-Yia was the expert on when to go because she’d grown up picking wild edibles in Greece.” Back in the kitchen, the women steamed the greens and mixed them with olive oil and chopped garlic. “Their eyes would gleam,” Leda notes. “The first wild greens of spring were better to them than chocolate.”

  Leda followed her mother into dance, winning a full scholarship to the American Ballet Theatre and later signing with the Manhattan Ballet. But she still kept roaming the parks for feral foods, once shocking prima ballerina Cynthia Gregory by sliding in next to her at a dinner party with her arms covered with raw scratches from reaching between thorny branches. During downtime between dance tours, Leda would spend months harvesting olives with her relatives in Greece or traveling Europe and California as a seasonal fruit picker, happy to be surrounded by fragrant, pluckable, biteable life. She began taking classes in ethnobotany at the New York Botanical Garden and studying with the yup-that’s-her-real-name herbalist Susan Weed. Leda would lead her friends and fellow dancers on all-day hunt-and-picks, then bring the famished hikers back to her apartment and teach them how to cook their haul. As her performance career came to an end, Leda realized she’d been working on her new calling since she was six years old.

  “The parks department has a limited weed-control budget, which is great for me,” she says. Leda now leads foraging tours and teaches classes at both the New York and Brooklyn botanical gardens. “People have no idea what’s right here,” she adds. Streams and ponds all over the Northeast are thick with watercress, a leafy green “superfood” that outscores spinach and chard as the most nutritionally dense of all vegetables. Often, however, wild watercress is mistaken as a nuisance weed and either discarded or ignored.

 
; “Like this—” Leda points to a cabbagey mess I’ve grown to hate on sight. As a kid, I scraped my knuckles bloody every summer trying to dig those things out of sidewalk cracks in front of the house. “That’s burdock,” Leda explains. “It grows in cities where nothing else will, and it’s fabulous.” Burdock has a long, thick taproot that’s a bear to unearth, but take it home and slice into a stir-fry and you’ve got a plateful of the Japanese delicacy gobo.

  The challenge for beginners is knowing what you’re yanking. Crete alone has more than a hundred varieties of wild edible greens. Many look identical but have different flavors and aromas, not to mention nutritional and medicinal benefits. “Stomach problems, skin disorders, breathing difficulties, even emotional uneasiness—you can treat them all with so-called weeds,” Leda explains. “It’s too bad we’ve developed this mentality that if it’s free and natural, it can’t be good.”

  Actually, a closer look shows that this Cretan snack stuffed with wild greens packs more nutritional punch than just about any fruit or vegetable you can buy. When scientists from Austria and Greece performed a chemical analysis of a Cretan fried pie in 2006, they were struck by two things: the sheer variety of the filling and the sky-high levels of vitamins, antioxidants, and essential fatty acids. The bite-size crescents, called kalitsounia, are typically packed with a combination of fennel, wild leeks, sow thistle, hartwort, corn poppy, sorrel, and Queen Anne’s lace, all of it growing wild and calorically dense. “In most cases,” the researchers found, “the wild greens had higher micronutrient content than those cultivated.”