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

by Christopher McDougall

  Paddy saw only one way out: Solvitur Ambulando. When in doubt, walk. Billy agreed: “We have decided that the best course for us is to make the long climb over Ida’s crest and the descent down its southern slopes before the German action has time to develop.” They’d wait until nightfall, then do their best to get over Ida and into a fresh hideout before daybreak. If they were caught, it would be on the run.

  Paddy and Billy leaned back under a jagged crack running alongside the cave mouth and snatched a few moments of morning sun before going back undercover. Even though it was a top-secret operation, someone fished out a camera and snapped a shot, capturing one last image of the two tired men on what would likely be the last day of their lives.

  —

  “That’s the crack,” Chris White said. “Drop down and I’ll show you.”

  I took a seat in the dirt and leaned back against the rock. Chris snapped a photo, then held it next to one he’d scanned from 1944. The details were identical: my head was right under the same crack, resting exactly where Paddy was before trying to get over Ida. Chris and I had just finished the trek from Anogia, and we’d accidentally put ourselves in a similar situation. We’d set off before dawn with no food, expecting to eat at an inn at the base of the mountain. But the inn was closed, the sun was going down, and the snow-capped peak loomed eight thousand feet overhead.

  There was only one way they could have pulled it off. Paddy and his gang must have been tapping into an ancient source of energy to power their way up Ida: they must have figured out how to use their own body fat as performance fuel. It’s a technique as old as human existence and the secret of some of the greatest athletic performances in endurance sports, as a broken-down Ironman was surprised to discover.

  CHAPTER 32

  I would argue that many of the ways in which we get sick today have a corporate, almost capitalist origin. We’ve also got this bizarre notion that finally came true, that our bodies don’t really matter.

  —DR. DANIEL LIEBERMAN,

  Harvard biologist and author of The Story of the Human Body

  IN 1983, Stu Mittleman was suffering from a vicious knot on his foot that baffled every specialist he’d seen.

  Until then, he’d been having a spectacular year. “I was now entering a new phase of my career that placed me among the top endurance athletes in the world,” he’d recall. In the span of just a few months, he’d smashed his own American one-hundred-mile record, finished second in the Ultraman World Championships (a double Ironman), and averaged nearly a hundred miles a day to set a new national mark for the six-day run. Stu’s ultradistance heroics and lady-killer’s grin made him such a media sweetheart that Gatorade named him its first national spokesman and Ted Koppel featured him on Nightline every evening during the six-day race.

  Stu was surfing a wave he couldn’t have even dreamed of a few years earlier. For extreme endurance studs, the eighties were a weird and wonderful time. Megadistance events were suddenly back in fashion after a century in hibernation, and TV was eating it up. Multiday races used to be all the rage back in the 1870s, not least because they added a dash of drama and cruelty to the typical test of speed: when you lined up at the start, you had no idea how far you’d have to run. You were the one who decided when you’d reached the finish, and how much rest—if any—you got in between. Superstars like Edward Payson Weston captivated the crowds by dreaming up new ways to challenge the clock and one another. In 1876, seventy thousand fans turned out to watch Weston go head-to-head in a six-day challenge against Daniel O’Leary, an Irish door-to-door book salesman who beat the champ and set a world’s best of 520 miles. But it wasn’t easy to keep selling tickets to see two guys repeat the same motion over and over again for a week, and eventually long-distance loping was pushed aside by more action-packed, bleacher-friendly games like football—until, in 1982, an exhausted college student named Julie Moss fell to her knees and changed everything.

  Julie was on the verge of winning her first Ironman when she collapsed a few yards shy of the tape. Another woman passed her, but Julie kept crawling. Instantly an anthem was born: “Just Finishing Is Winning.” Julie the Unbreakable arrived right when America needed her most; she showed she had the sand to stick it out when most of us were wondering, privately, how many of us did. The seventies had left a raw nerve in the national psyche: had we betrayed Plymouth Rock and Valley Forge and turned into a nation of quitters? The evidence was pretty depressing. In quick succession, we’d watched Richard Nixon cheat his way to an easy win, then cut and run rather than face the music. “I would have preferred to carry through to the finish, whatever the personal agony it would have involved. My family unanimously urged me to do so,” Nixon said, right before skedaddling. We scrambled onto a rooftop helicopter to get out of Vietnam while the Vietcong stuck it out in the jungle, then cringed as Jimmy Carter wobbled in the face of the Ayatollah’s stony resolve during the Iran hostage crisis and fainted less than halfway into a six-mile fun run. “If you get in it,” press secretary Jody Powell had warned the president before the race, “then you’d darn well better finish.” Well…

  No wonder “go da distance,” as Rocky Balboa put it, became the message of the seventies. You didn’t have to win, the Italian Stallion declared; you just had to not wimp out. That was 1976, and it was as if a Bat-Signal had flashed across the sky. Within a few years, all kinds of strange, Not Wimping Out events had popped up, like Alaska’s 1,112-mile Iditarod, California’s 100-mile Western States trail race, and Hawaii’s Ironman triathlon—dreamed up, not coincidentally, by Navy officers just three years out of Vietnam. At first these contests were treated as Battles of the Freaks, until Julie Moss—twenty-four years old, still in college, and One of Us—jolted our eyes from the winners in the front of the pack toward the heroes in the back. TV was soon zooming in to cover these gritty Everymen, as well as a new creation by Fred Lebow, the master showman who started the New York City Marathon: on July 4, 1983, Lebow revived the Six-Day Race and soon made a star out of a Queens college instructor named Stu Mittleman.

  A few years earlier, Stu was in Boulder, Colorado, for New Year’s when he decided to see if he could run to the top of Flagstaff Mountain. It was only about a two-mile climb, but he was so psyched when he reached the peak that he turned around and ran right back down to the center of town and into Frank Shorter’s running store.

  “How do I get into this year’s Boston Marathon?” he asked.

  You don’t, he was told. The race was in less than four months, and he’d first have to qualify by running another marathon in under three hours. Fine—two weeks later, Stu averaged a smokin’ 6:20 a mile to finish San Diego’s Mission Bay Marathon in 2:46. Raw speed he obviously had, but as he began to experiment with longer distances, he discovered his true talent was staying power. Soon he was cranking out more than a half-marathon a day, seven days a week, and leaving the standard Ironman behind to take on twice the distance: nearly five miles in the water, 224 by bike, and 52 and change on foot.

  But damn. That right foot! Just when he was reaching his peak, a sore spot behind Stu’s little toe kept swelling until it was big as a Ping-Pong ball and made his entire leg throb like an abscessed tooth. Stu was supposed to be boarding a flight for France in a few weeks for another six-day race, this time as the only American invited to a showdown of international all-stars, but after shuffling from one specialist to another, his foot wasn’t any better. Stu’s last tune-up before the event was a triathlon in Long Island. He postponed the inevitable as long as he could and even showed up at registration, but he finally had to limp up to the race director and break the news that he was bowing out.

  Please, the race director pleaded, first do me a favor. Long Island triathlons don’t get many TV sensations in their lineups, least of all model-handsome men of steel fresh off the Today show and a weeklong spot on Nightline. Before you make up your mind, the race director urged, see Dr. Phil Maffetone.

  Stu sighed. I have already seen n
early a dozen medical doctors, chiropractors, and body workers and have basically given up hope that my injury can be healed, he thought. Still, he decided to humor the guy and hear what Dr. Phil had to say. That way, at least, he could drop out with a clear conscience while satisfying his own curiosity. For some time, he’d been hearing stories that were too good to be true about this healer of last resort who not only fixed the unfixable but coaxed astonishing performances out of slumping runners and triathletes. “Phil has a reputation for getting broken-down, over-trained, world-class athletes back up and running,” Stu would recall.

  Luckily, Dr. Phil Maffetone was right at hand. He’d come to watch one of his reconstruction projects compete, and he agreed to take a look at Stu right there on the lawn outside the VFW hall. As they chatted, Stu discovered Phil wasn’t even an M.D.; he was a chiropractor with such severe attention-deficiency that he’d barely squeaked through high school and still couldn’t stand to read books. Granted, Phil was a former track athlete, but otherwise there was no outward reason he should know anything other doctors didn’t. Maybe Stu’s friends were only impressed because Phil treated them like real patients and not high-functioning psychotics. Phil didn’t lecture them that “all that pounding is bad for the body” or answer with a shrug and “What do you expect?” when they described how their heels ached after a two-hour run. Phil wasn’t shocked by big miles and didn’t smirk at the adventurers who tackled them; as far as he was concerned, a properly fueled and maintained body could click along forever. He took their pain—and their potential—seriously.

  Phil had Stu lie down on the grass. He began pushing Stu’s arms and legs to assess muscle resistance. “Relax,” he said. He grasped Stu’s foot and gave it a yank. Angels sang.

  “Suddenly,” Stu says, “the lump disappears!” He can’t believe it. He jogs around gingerly, and for the first time in months he can run without pain. He’s so thrilled, he gets stupid; instead of playing it safe and seeing if the miracle lasts until lunch, Stu decides to jump right into the triathlon. He storms along to a top-twenty finish and his foot feels fantastic.

  “This is just first aid,” Phil warns him. He’d found a dislodged bone in Stu’s foot and managed to snap it into place, but worse breakdowns lay ahead unless Stu made some serious changes.

  Stu was all ears. Sure. What’s my problem—running technique? Weak arches?

  Sugar.

  Sug—really?

  And not only sweets and sodas, Phil explained. Pasta, power bars, pancakes, pizza, orange juice, rice, bread, cereal, granola, oatmeal—all the processed carbohydrates that Stu had been told were the ideal runner’s diet. They’re just sugar in disguise, Phil believed. Humans are superb endurance athletes who’ve roamed farther across this planet than any other species, and we didn’t do it on Gatorade and bagels. We did it by relying on a much richer and cleaner burning fuel: our own body fat.

  “The point of your training isn’t to see how fast you can get your feet to move,” Phil said. “The point is to get your body to change the way it gets energy. You want it to burn more fat and less sugar.” And as it stood now, Stu’s body was “a sugar-burning, fat-storing monstrosity.”

  Stu was baffled. Okay. But how does food hurt your foot?

  Think of your body as a furnace, Phil explained. Fill it with slow-burning logs and it will run smooth and strong for hours. But fill it with paper and gas-soaked rags and it will burn hot, rattle the pipes, and die out until it’s fed again. That’s what you did, Phil said. You shook yourself into an injury by stuffing your furnace with garbage. If you want to stay healthy and perform your best, you need to teach your body to use fat as fuel. Immediately.

  Stu saw three major difficulties. The first problem with Phil’s plan, of course, was Phil. The man was—and there’s no way to sugarcoat it—a stone-cold hippie. He had long hair and a dangly ponytail and used words that made Stu’s stomach heave: “holistic” and “hormones” and “walk before you run.” Literally: walk. Phil wanted Stu to start his next race by walking. Good Lord. The second problem with Phil’s plan was Stu: he had a major international championship in three weeks, and Rule #1 for all sports is Don’t Experiment Before Game Day. Phil wasn’t even proposing an overhaul; he wanted Stu to completely reverse his diet, training, and race strategy and do it all in less than twenty days.

  But the biggest problem was Everyone Else in the World. Everyone Else in the World thought the “Maffetone Method” was nuts. Carbs were warrior food; everybody knew that. Stu was an academic by training, and right from the beginning he’d made himself a student of his sport. “I cut back my work hours, lived like an ascetic monk, trained like a maniac, ate only what Runner’s World told me I should, and did a carbohydrate depletion followed by a carbo load in the last few days before the event,” Stu would recall. So now what? Runner’s World was dead wrong? All those pre-race pasta dinners were poison? Carbohydrates were hurting, not helping?

  The Maffetone Method even defied the greatest voice of all: Dr. Tim Noakes, author of Lore of Running and one of the world’s most respected sports scientists. Dr. Noakes was both a medical doctor and the head of Exercise and Sports Science research at the University of Cape Town, and so trusted an authority that he served as expedition doctor for Lewis Pugh’s North Pole swim and spearheaded reforms that dramatically reduced South African rugby injuries. Moreover, Noakes was his own space monkey; by age sixty-four he’d run South Africa’s fifty-six-mile Comrades ultramarathon seven times and had another seventy marathons under his belt. With more than four hundred scientific papers and two thousand competitive miles to his name, Noakes knew more about runners, living and dead, than the runners themselves. He’d not only written the eight-hundred-page Lore, but he kept rewriting it; every few years, Noakes updated his bible with fresh science. The best in the world listened to Dr. Tim Noakes, and Dr. Tim Noakes was all about carbs.

  “Athletes whose training involves prolonged high-intensity daily exercise must eat high-carbohydrates diets,” Noakes made it clear. “Performance during prolonged exercise can potentially be enhanced by increasing the amount of carbohydrate stored before exercise,” he went on, “and by maintaining a high rate of carbohydrate utilization, particularly when fatigued, via ingestion of carbohydrates in the appropriate amounts.” It was all right there in chapter 3. And all those fifty-plus pages on “Energy Systems and Running Performance” could be nicely summed up in just seven words: Stuff in carbs and keep on stuffing.

  And sorry—who was Phil Maffetone again? A ponytailed backcracker from suburban New York. Those were Stu’s two options: the man who wrote The Book versus the man who probably hadn’t read it. Ordinarily it would be an easy decision, but pain relief is the ultimate persuader. Stu decided to give the Maffetone Method a chance.

  Okay, he told Phil. How do we start?

  Simple, Phil began. To use fat as fuel, you need to do only two things: cut out sugar and lower your heart rate. “We store only a very limited amount of carbohydrate in our bodies,” Phil explained. “Compare this with a relatively unlimited supply of fat.” Carbs are a puddle; fat is the Pacific. At any time, your body has some 160,000 calories on tap: about 2,000 from sugar, 25,000 from protein, and nearly 140,000—87 percent—are fat. “Even an athlete with only 6 percent body fat will have enough fat to fuel exercise lasting for many hours,” Phil explained. “When you use more fat, you generate more energy and your carbohydrate supply lasts longer. When you teach your body to rely on fat, your combustion of carbs goes down, and so does your craving for them.”

  But there’s no pussyfooting around. Your body loves fat; it’s a treasure your system would rather hoard than burn, so if it senses there’s any other fuel at hand, it will use that first and convert the leftovers into more fat. To free himself from the sugar-burn cycle, Stu would have to go cold turkey: he could stuff himself silly all day, but only on meat, fish, eggs, avocados, vegetables, and nuts. No beans, no fruit, no grains. No soy, no wine, no beer. Whole dairy lik
e sour cream and real cheese were in; low-fat milk was out.

  That was Part 1. Part 2 was even more basic: Slow down. When you sprint, Phil explained, you jack up your heart rate. Your body interprets a hammering heart as EMERGENCY! so it goes looking for those gas-soaked rags. It wants the fastest-burning fuel it can find, and that means sugar. But once you’ve conditioned your body to rely on fat, you’ll be able to run as fast as ever—and much faster. For Stu to keep his heart rate in his fat-burning zone, Phil had an easy formula: just subtract your age from 180. Stu was thirty-two years old, so Phil gave him a heart-rate monitor and set it for 153 beats per minute (148 plus five bonus beats because Stu was a highly conditioned athlete). Anytime the monitor beeped, it meant Stu had to slow to a walk until his pulse eased back down.

  For three weeks, Stu was a perfect disciple. Come the six-day race in France, however, he’d had enough. It was humiliating enough when all the other runners shot off around the track while he trailed them at a walk (“Yech!” Stu grimaced), but to watch them snacking on cookies and candy at the aid stations while he had nothing but almonds…well, that just bordered on human-rights abuse. Unfortunately, Phil Maffetone had come to France with him, so Stu had to sneak cookies off the aid station table and hide them at the far end of the track, where he could munch later when Phil wasn’t looking.

  But before digging into his stash, Stu noticed something. For once, he could actually see what was going on. Usually during a race he was huffing along with his chin on his chest, but this time he was head high and breathing easy. Come to think of it, he’d felt that way during every run for the past three weeks. For most runners, enjoying the view is a rare sensation; as soon as fatigue kicks in, your eyes drop to the pavement and your vision tunnels. You’re no longer in the present; you’re locked on to how far you’ve come and how far you’ve got to go. Stu always assumed pain was the price of gain, but since he’d been on the Maffetone Method, his runs had actually been a pleasure.