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

by Christopher McDougall

  For years, Kish has been teaching other blind students how to move in real-life ways. He sent two of them off to mountain-bike with Finkel in California’s Santa Ana Mountains. “To determine where the trail is going, and where the bushes and rocks and fence posts and trees are, the boys rely on echolocation,” Finkel notes. The riders slap their tongues against the bottom of their mouths, listen for the echoes, and form a mental image of the trail ahead—all at full speed. One “flies down the dirt trail in aerodynamic form, hands off the brakes, clicking as fast and as loud as he can,” an awestruck Finkel finds. “I try and warn them when the trail presents a serious consequence, like a long drop-off on one side or a cactus jutting out. But mostly I’m just along for the ride. It’s difficult to believe, even though it’s happening right in front of me. It’s incredible.” The only crash, in fact, is Finkel’s fault, when he hits the brakes in front of one of the blind riders and turns himself into an instant tree.

  Your nose, which can detect more than a trillion distinct odors, has as much untapped ancestral power as your ears. A research team at the University of California, Berkeley, was curious to see whether humans can mimic bloodhounds and track by scent. So they blindfolded thirty-two student volunteers and had them put on earmuffs, thick gloves, and kneepads to eliminate any sensory input except smell. Then they laid out a thirty-foot trail of chocolate essence in a grassy field and turned them loose. “Two-thirds of the subjects successfully followed the scent, zigzagging back and forth across the path like a dog tracking a pheasant,” the researchers reported in Nature Neuroscience. With zero training, most of them did well; with a little practice, they were great. Their tracking speed more than doubled after a few days, and that was just the tip of their potential. “Longer-term training would lead to further increases in tracking velocity,” the researchers noted.

  Yale University neuroscientist Dr. Gordon Shepherd had the money quote when he learned of the experiment: “If we go back on our four legs and get down on the ground, we may be able to do things we had no idea we could do.” Seeing in the dark, tracking prey by nose—today they sound like superpowers, but for two million years, they were just survival. We haven’t lost the natural strengths that made us the most formidable creatures on the planet. We might just need the Natural Method to wake them up.

  —

  On Itacaré’s beach that morning, Erwan Le Corre hoists a rock about the size of a watermelon and passes it to Serginho, who pivots and hands it to me. I swing it into the hands of the guy beside me as Erwan hands Serginho another rock, then another, until there are five in play and it’s all I can do to get one rock out of my hands before the next is shoved into my gut. Unlike medicine balls, which always have the same, easily graspable shape, the unpredictable size and weight of rocks forces you to focus intensely on grip and balance. Even though the rocks are slickening with sweat and my arms are burning, I’m desperate not to be the first to let one slip. Luckily, just when I’m in danger of smashing my toes, Erwan raises a hand for us to stop. I drop my rock, relieved—until I find out what’s up next.

  He pairs us off for Erwan-style wind sprints: Each of us has to hoist another guy across our shoulders in a rescue hold and race in and out of the knee-high surf. If there’s a more nerve-racking workout than preventing a 220-pound Thai fighter from falling on your head while you’re sprinting through churning water, I don’t want to know about it. Humans are heavy and lumpy and oddly balanced, forcing you to constantly adjust your posture, footing, handholds, and core. Keeping control of a body on your back, as I soon learn, demands intense concentration.

  Next Erwan has a pile of six-foot-long driftwood poles at the ready. The other guys know what to expect and start trotting down the beach. As they pass Erwan, he tosses some of them a pole. He tosses the last one to me, then takes off on a run with his hands outstretched. I toss it back, and he immediately flips it toward me again, this time a little ahead so I have to accelerate. We cross the entire beach this way, mixing up our throws, totally absorbed in our run-’n’-gun until I notice we’re about to crash into the rocks. Without breaking stride, Erwan flips the stick around, plants it in the sand, and pole-vaults up onto the boulders.

  By the time I climb up after him, he’s twenty yards away, scuttling to the top of a giant rock overhanging the sand. “The secret to a good jump,” he says, “is a good second jump. Remember your springs—” And with that, he’s sailing through the air. He lands ten feet below with a deep knee bend, but instead of rolling or dropping to his knees, he bounces right up with a hop and tears off at a sprint. “You never see an animal stick a jump by flopping all over the ground,” he calls up as he loops back around. “Cats are running the second they land. If you do it the same way, you’ll decrease impact and be ready to flow into your next move.”

  All that empty air below makes Zuqueto pause. “Caralho! Esse gajo e forte,” Zuqueto mutters. Damn! That guy is strong. Then he surrenders to trust and sails off over the rocks.

  —

  For Erwan, finding Itacaré was lucky, but no accident. He’d grown up in Étréchy, an old-worldish city in northern France that’s only twenty-five miles from Paris but still surrounded by tumbling rivers and old-growth forest. Erwan’s father worked in a bank during the week and loved to plunge into the woods on the weekends, taking his son on long, rambling hikes. “He would climb a boulder that was too hard for me,” Erwan recalls. “I’d ask him for help. He’d just shake his head and go like this”—Erwan lets his face go stony and crooks a beckoning finger.

  Any soccer coach would have drooled over this tall, fearless, catquick kid, but those woodsy weekend boot camps with his silent father squelched any interest Erwan might have had in team sports. Instead he went the solitary route: first martial arts, earning his karate black belt by the time he was eighteen, then Olympic-style weight lifting, then triathlons. Oddly, the better he did, the worse he felt; he worried constantly that he wasn’t training hard enough and became enraged whenever he lost in competition. Erwan was still a teenager, but already his fun was making him miserable.

  He needed a way out, and the werewolf of Paris just might have it. For some time, Erwan had been hearing rumors about a mysterious inner-city savage who roamed the rooftops at night and called himself Hors Humain—“Beyond Human.” Erwan asked around and eventually was led to Don Jean Habrey, the Fagin of a secret gang of young men who turned the city into their own wilderness park. Don Jean was pushing forty at the time, but Erwan couldn’t tell by his fight-ready physique and mane of thick black hair held back by a sensei’s headband. Soon Erwan was part of the tribe, learning a kind of urban guerrilla training that Don Jean called Combat Vital.

  “It was like a ‘Fight Club’ of natural movement,” Erwan explained. “We would train most of the time at night so as not to be seen, climbing bridges, balancing on the top of scaffoldings, kicking walls to toughen our bare feet, moving on all fours, dropping off bridges into the Seine in the freezing cold of winter.” Combat Vital was equal parts hardcore conditioning and high-wire performance art, both without a net. Don Jean’s gang would hang by their legs from a pedestrian overpass and do upside-down crunches over speeding traffic, and climb to the top of apartment buildings to leap barefoot from roof to roof.

  “There is no ‘try’ for this kind of practice,” Erwan says. “If you miss, you die.”

  But Don Jean seemed unkillable. Over time, he graduated from secret midnight stunts into full-on spectacles, leaping from a helicopter in nothing but a bathing suit to swim around an iceberg off Greenland and, at age sixty, serenading the Loch Ness Monster with a one-man kettledrum sonata before free-diving into the freezing lake to look for it. For seven years, Erwan roamed Paris and dodged police by night with Don Jean and the Combat Vital crew. He spent his summers working the beaches of Corsica, selling toys and junk jewelry and stick-on tattoos to sunbathing tourists, eventually figuring out a way to become his own middleman; he designed his own plastic refrigerator magnets a
nd found a factory in Shanghai to manufacture them. Soon he was earning enough in royalties to live on the rest of the year.

  As Don Jean drifted toward showmanship, his student got serious about scholarship. Erwan’s eyes first opened to Combat Vital’s roots when he was prowling the secondhand-book stalls along the Seine and happened across an old copy of Georges Hébert’s L’Éducation Physique. He’d vaguely heard of it—there was talk among the Combat Vital disciples that Don Jean, and even the Yamakasi creators of Parkour, had gotten some of their ideas from Hébert. Erwan dug in and was electrified.

  “Be useful”—genius! It wasn’t just a motto, Erwan realized; it was a law of nature, a first principle that explains how human history formed the human body. Suddenly it made sense: we’re weird-looking for a reason. Strip us naked and humans look more like insects than animals, what with our spindly legs and gangly arms and fat, round heads swiveling on top of peculiarly inflexible spines. We’re slow and weak and can barely climb to save our lives, and we lack all the really good stuff like tails and hooves and fangs. We’d be helpless if we couldn’t do three things: hunt, gather, and share.

  Period. That’s it. Those three occupations have been the human career path since the dawn of time, and we’re still at it today. Shakespearean sonnets, Google, the Super Bowl, NASA—strip all human achievement down to basics and they’re essentially the same thing: we look for stuff, we hit it with a rock, we share the goodies and the info with the clan. We’re far from the baddest cats in the jungle, but we don’t have to be; for those three jobs, our bodies are the perfect tool. We can stand tall and pivot, allowing us to throw with deadly accuracy. We’ve got multi-jointed arms and awesome thumbs, ideal for gripping and toting. We’ve got language and literature because our necks are long, our lips are nimble, and our thoracic control is off the charts, all of it combining to allow the power of speech. We’re Mother Nature’s problem child, the species that can’t sit still, because our upright posture and rubbery legs give us fantastic running range. We are what we do, and what we do is move—up mountains, across rivers, through the snakiest rock-face wormholes. We can’t even stay put on our own planet.

  Hébert didn’t invent this stuff, Erwan knew. Well before witnessing the Martinique volcano, Hébert had been intrigued by the oceangoing gymnastics of the gabiers, deckhands who wrestled sailcloth and scaled masts and wet rigging in wind and surging seas. Those guys must have been really impressive and great athletes, Erwan thought. Hébert also spent time in French colonies and found his ideal athletes in Montagnard mountain tribesmen in Vietnam and African hunter-gatherers. “Their bodies were splendid, flexible, nimble, skillful, enduring, resistant and yet they had no other tutor in Gymnastics but their lives in Nature,” Hébert observed.

  Hébert wasn’t an inventor; he was an observer. That’s what made him so fiery about things like female strength, because he knew the truth was right under the nose of anyone willing to open their eyes and minds. “Young black African woman, where the magnificent development of the torso stands comparison with Venus,” Hébert argued. “What a marvelous ideal for the French mother!” Renoir’s paintings of bathing beauties drove Hébert nuts—why pretend women are nothing more than animated cream puffs? Men and women don’t have the same bodies, but they have the same motor skills. “The natural doctrine applies as much to girls’ education as it does to boys’,” Hébert insisted.

  Wait, put gender aside for a sec. What about age? If Hébert was right, Erwan thought, he wasn’t just promoting good health—he was freezing time. How did Hébert put it? Their bodies were resistant. Exactly. There’s no margin for error in the wilderness, so our survival depended on long-lasting suppleness and sinew. When that volcano blows, when the clan needs your help, when the moment comes to move, you can’t be icing your sore knee on the sofa or excusing yourself as too old, young, or girly. Méthode Naturelle could make you not only powerful, Erwan realized, but also age resistant. You’d get strong and stay strong, deep into old age.

  Erwan was on fire. He went on a research pilgrimage to Reims, site of Georges Hébert’s first training playground, which was destroyed during frontline fighting in World War I. The Marquis Melchior de Polignac, owner of Champagne Pommery, was a big fan of Hébert’s work, so he made sure it was later restored to Hébert’s original specifications. While Erwan was in Reims, he knocked up at Pommery headquarters to see if maybe they had some old Georges Hébert stuff lying around? Journals, possibly. Or photos?

  They had something even better: a phone number.

  In the suburbs of Paris, Hébert’s son was still alive. Régis Hébert agreed to let this intense young disciple visit…and keep on visiting. Every time Erwan returned to the Hébert house, he was hungrier than before. “I came back with a big list of questions—questions I couldn’t find any answer to in Hébert’s book, about Hébert, his personal lifestyle, how he educated his children.”

  Régis said his father had lived what he preached, including the revolutionary step of deploying his wife and other women as Méthode Naturelle instructors. Just before the war began, Georges felt he was close to connecting true health with heroism. “It was the great time of MN,” Erwan says. “Hébert believed that if everyone was practicing MN with its altruistic goal, with its moral education benefits, there would be no wars anymore, no reasons for people to be in conflict with each other.”

  Hébert didn’t live to see his dream come true, but Erwan could. Someone had to remind the world what Méthode Naturelle had to offer. Erwan went to get Régis’s blessing—and the old man erupted. How dare Erwan think he could follow in the great man’s footsteps? If Erwan tried, Régis warned him, he’d regret it. Erwan was stung and mystified. What the hell just happened? A few weeks earlier, Régis had been all smiles and encouragement. Now he was sputtering and threatening.

  —

  Erwan couldn’t figure out what went wrong, until he tracked down some other MN old-timers who wised him up. “Hébert’s son is the gravedigger of his father’s work,” they told Erwan. Régis can’t revive Méthode Naturelle himself but is afraid someone else will, they said. So he just clutches his father’s legacy to his chest and monitors anything said or written about it “like some kind of censor.”

  So the old man never really wanted to meet me in the first place, Erwan thought. He just wanted to find out what I was up to. Okay, Erwan decided; so that’s how we’ll play. Erwan knew Georges Hébert had sucked up information from all over—not just from native islanders but also from thinkers like Edwin Checkley; Dr. Paul Carton, the pioneering French physician; Francisco Amorós, the Spanish military instructor; and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, the Swiss education innovator. From their ideas, Hébert fashioned his own.

  “Did Hébert just replicate the path Amorós had designed?” Erwan asks. “Nope. He followed it but retooled it, improved it, redesigned it.”

  So to hell with Régis. Now it was Erwan’s turn.

  —

  Serginho and the guys have to scoot, and only then does it hit me that we’ve been working out nonstop for nearly two hours. I’m wiped out, but exhilarated. Erwan suggests we cool off by practicing one more skill—open-water deep dives—but before we reach the surf, we’re approached by a young woman who’d been watching from under a coconut tree.

  So, she asks, what’s with all the rock jumping and stick throwing?

  Instead of explaining, Erwan grabs a driftwood pole. He plants one end in the sand and rests the other on his shoulder. He bends into a squat. “What’s your name?” he asks.

  “Sandra.”

  “Sandra, if you can get to the top of this pole, I have a surprise for you.”

  Sandra studies his face for hints of a prank. Then she sprints, straight up the pole and over the top of Erwan’s head. She’s on the ground before she realizes she really did it.

  “Bravo!” Erwan says, delighted. Then he removes the pole from his shoulder and places it on hers. “Surprise!”

  Erwan barely
gives her a chance to protest before he’s off, quick-footing up the pole like a tightrope walker. Sandra’s face flashes through four emotional peaks in four seconds: surprise, fear, resolve, and—as Erwan reaches her shoulder and hops off—triumph.

  “Did you know you were that strong?” Erwan asks.

  Sandra shakes her head.

  “Now you do. Don’t get into trouble!”

  Sandra smiles and starts to head back to her tree. But Erwan has another question.

  “Are you doing…yoga?”

  Uh-oh.

  “Yes, I’m an instructor and—”

  “You teach that?” Erwan says. “Have you ever used yoga for anything useful?”

  “It’s very use—”

  “No, in real life. In an emergency. Has anyone ever shouted, Quick! Sun-salute for your life! Of course not. But you hear Run for your life! Climb for your life! Don’t worry, I’ll carry you out of here! all the time. Humans made yoga up for recreation, not for survival. No animal would ever do it. Changing postures in the same place with your head down? Forget it! In the wild, that’s death. You need the luxury of a no-danger environment for yoga. Everything is controlled—the soft mat, the temperature, some guru telling you what to do. It’s not instinctive or natural. It’s make-believe.”

  Yoga isn’t about emergencies, Sandra argues. It’s about finding balance and a mind-body connection.

  “Your body will never be more connected to your mind than when something is at stake,” Erwan retorts. “That’s how you measure the value of a movement: by its consequences. Climb a tree, throw a rock, balance on the edge of a cliff—you lose focus for a fraction of a second, you’re screwed. It takes a very affluent and indulged culture to convince itself that standing around in weird poses is exercise.”