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

by Christopher McDougall

  “Each energy-producing state has specific and real sensory-based references,” he’d learned. “Your body knows this by the way the world ‘looks,’ ‘sounds,’ and ‘feels.’ When you move in a comfortable fat-burning state, the visual information is distinct, expansive, and three dimensional with a peripheral vastness and expansiveness that is unique and identifiable. It’s as though you are in a 3-D surround vision movie theatre.”

  You’re seeing with the eyes of a hunter. But when your heart rate climbs, you become the hunted. “As soon as you shift into a more challenging sugar-burning state, visual information tends to collapse inward, the peripheral fringes tend to disappear and your attention gets drawn into a much narrower field of vision. Visual images tend to flatten out, become two-dimensional, and you begin to feel as though you are running through a tunnel with the world painted on the inside walls.”

  So that’s how hunter-gatherers run antelopes to death. They don’t act like the animal they’re trying to kill; instead they’re silent and graceful, moving easily with their eyesight sharp, their breathing controlled, their bottomless body-fat energy on tap. Much the way Stu was moving now, in fact, as he smoothly and stealthily pursued the runners who’d dropped him at the start. Three weeks earlier, Stu had been so hobbled by injury he couldn’t compete; now, he was chasing down the best ultradistance runners in the world and getting faster by the day. Stu felt so good that for the entire six days, he never dug into his cookie stash. He set a new American record of 571 miles, crushing the old one by more than a half-marathon and finishing in second behind only the Beast himself, 24-Hour World Record holder Jean-Gilles Boussiquet of France.

  That did it; Stu was now a fat-as-fuel true believer. For the next ten years he whirlwinded through the record books with such strength and style, it looked more like art than effort. In a display of “virtually flawless footracing,” as one journalist put it, Stu defeated the reigning world champion in a thousand-mile showdown and not only shattered the old mark by sixteen hours, but even ran his second five hundred miles faster than his first. He handled the back half of his life the same way; instead of slowing down in his forties, he got stronger, running more than fifty miles a day as he set a new speed record from Los Angeles to New York City. “No other American ultrarunner, male or female, has exhibited national class excellence at such a wide range of racing distances,” his American Ultrarunning Hall of Fame induction proclaimed.

  But the funny thing is, Stu wasn’t even Phil’s best student. Compared with Mark Allen, Stu was…well, there’s really no comparing anyone to Mark Allen. When Mark came to Phil in the late eighties, he was in his twenties but already feeling old. Triathlons were beating him up and not paying off; Mark was always hurt in training and blowing up in races, either fading toward the finish or dropping out altogether. Like Stu, his broken body gave him an open mind. “I was warned that his methods were probably going to sound crazy,” Mark would recall. Not to mention embarrassing: Phil made Mark pedal far behind the pack during group rides and plod along at half speed during runs. Mark’s training partners were convinced he was washed up…until four months later, when Mark went flying past. “I had become an aerobic machine!”

  “I was now able to burn fat for fuel efficiently enough to hold a pace that a year before was red-lining my effort,” Mark explained. “I was no longer feeling like I was ready for an injury the next run I went on, and I was feeling fresh after my workouts instead of being totally wasted.” Mark soon tore off an insane streak: for two years, he didn’t lose a race anywhere, at any distance. He won Ironman six times, including a stunning comeback victory at age thirty-seven, but what’s more intriguing is what happened after he retired. Bikes got lighter, wetsuits got sleeker, training and nutrition became more lab-tested and sophisticated—yet no one could touch Mark’s times. It was nearly two decades before another Ironman could match him.

  “Mark Allen was well ahead of us scientists,” agrees Dr. Asker Jeukendrup, a human metabolism expert at England’s University of Birmingham and an accomplished Ironman himself. Jeukendrup is among the top ranks of endurance specialists, yet even he’s a little foggy about the role played by the quiet guy with the ponytail. So was Mike Pigg, who only tracked Phil down at Mark Allen’s urging. “Phil Maffetone is not crazy,” Pigg insists, which suggests he wasn’t always sure himself. “I feel very fortunate to have met him when I did.” After switching to the Maffetone Method, Pigg won four USA Triathlon National Championships and remained resilient enough to compete for nearly a quarter-century. Dr. George Sheehan—the cardiologist, best-selling author, and “philosopher king of the marathon”—also put his legs in Dr. Phil’s hands.

  But oddly, Phil eventually began seeing more rock stars than Ironmen. An athlete has to be supremely confident or borderline desperate to gamble on a system that flips everything she’s been told and guarantees she’s heading straight to the back of the pack, possibly for an entire season. But rock stars don’t have to deal with doubtful coaches and corporate sponsors; they just have to be strong enough to endure months of onstage musical marathons. “Musicians are all searching for the same two things,” Maffetone learned. “How do I get more energy and how can I become more creative?”

  James Taylor was an early Maffetone adopter (“I feel great!” he’d rave), and the Red Hot Chili Peppers brought Phil on board as tour doctor (years later, at age fifty, Peppers bassist Flea could still crank out a sub-four-hour marathon in a driving rainstorm). Rick Rubin, the great bearded sage of the sound studio, tracked down Phil in 2003 when Johnny Cash was on his deathbed. Phil got Johnny back on his feet, helped restore his eyesight, and began weaning him off his astonishingly high pill count of some forty different medications. Cash was so grateful, he gave Phil one of his guitars. But ultimately, Cash couldn’t recover from the loss of his wife and the aftereffects of the chemical barrage. Phil had his hand on Cash’s shoulder one afternoon when Cash turned and looked him in the eye.

  “It’s time,” Cash said.

  No one saw Dr. Phil at Ironman after that. No one saw much of him anywhere, unless you were Rick Rubin. Rubin owned Shangri-La, the secluded Malibu bungalow where Bob Dylan and the Band used to camp out and jam with Eric Clapton and Van Morrison (and where, for a time, TV horse Mr. Ed was stabled). Every once in a while, Phil would roll up at Shangri-La and play Rubin some songs he’d written. Then he’d climb back into his car and disappear into the Arizona desert. Phil was so out of touch, it was some time before he learned that after thirty years, he’d won both an argument and a convert:

  Dr. Tim Noakes, the “High Priest of Carbo-Loading,” was making a confession.

  CHAPTER 33

  I was quite wrong. Sorry, everyone.

  —DR. TIMOTHY NOAKES

  I WAS FAMISHED by the time I met Dr. Noakes in the lobby of his Washington, D.C., hotel and figured we’d head straight out to eat. It was pushing 1 P.M., and Noakes had been stuck in a conference all morning discussing, among other things, his biggest professional mistake. We just had time for a hearty lunch before his flight back home to South Africa. But Noakes had other ideas.

  “I won’t eat until tomorrow,” he said. “Or the next day.”

  “You go two days without food?”

  “Or more. Sometimes I’ve got to stop and think to remember my last meal.”

  Looking at him, it’s hard to believe. At sixty-four, Noakes is tall and fit as a lumberjack, with the rangy look of the college rower he once was and the barely contained energy of a man whose mind is a constantly expanding to-do list. Everything about him seemed to demand constant refueling—his locked-in focus when listening, his Christmas-morning grin when amused, the unruly brown hair barely touched by time or a comb. It would all make sense, Noakes promised, when I heard his story. He suggested we grab coffee and get right to it. He had a lot to get off his chest.

  “It’s really funny when you think how chance events occur,” he begins. In 2010, Noakes was finally reaching the end of
a grim crusade. Back in 1981, he suspected joggers were being tricked into drinking themselves to death. Companies like Gatorade were pushing the idea that runners needed lots of fluids to avoid dehydration, and the race directors and running magazines who depend on sponsorship and advertising were quick to join the chorus. Suddenly, you could barely run a mile in a race without someone handing you a cup. Runners were told, “Drink until your eyeballs float,” and “Don’t just rely on thirst.”

  But hang on; when did thirst suddenly become unreliable? For millions of years, it’s been fantastically effective. In fact, it’s one of the most important aspects of our evolutionary development: humans lived or died by their ability to lope long on hot days, and the reason we survived is that our bodies told us when and how much to drink. It was precisely because we’re resistant to dehydration that we could run other animals to death. “Humans evolved to be extremely adept long-distance runners with an unmatched ability to regulate their body temperatures when exercising in the heat,” Noakes knew. “And our brains developed the ability to delay the need to drink—a crucial adaptation if we were to chase after our potential meals in the midday heat when there was little water available and no time to stop the hunt to search for fluid.”

  Noakes began checking the habits of runners from the pre-Gatorade era and discovered that old-school marathoners had no trouble going dry. “I only chew gum. I take no drink at all,” Matthew Maloney said after he set the marathon world record in 1908. Mike Gratton won the London Marathon in 1983 without a single sip, and Arthur Newton, the legendary ultrarunner and five-time Comrades champion, believed, “Even in the warmest English weather, a 26-mile run ought to be manageable with no more than a single drink or, at most, two.” To this day, the San people of the Kalahari can run up to seven hours in heat of 108° Fahrenheit on just a few swallows.

  So now all of a sudden the American College of Sports Medicine, with major funding by its first platinum sponsor—Gatorade—was declaring, “Thirst may be an unreliable index of fluids needed during exercise”? Something else was fishy: the fifty-six-mile Comrades race never had a problem with dehydration and heat illness before it set up regular aid stations. “This paradox did not escape me,” Noakes points out. “How could ‘dehydration and heat illness’ have become a significant problem in marathon and ultramarathon running after frequent drinking had become the accepted norm?”

  Nothing added up—least of all the corpses. When Noakes researched postrace body weights, he found something peculiar: elite runners pump out more sweat than the midpack plodders. If dehydration were truly a danger, how did the elites even make it to the finish line? Logically, the faster runners should be knocked off their feet. Instead, they’re stronger than everyone else in the field. And when Noakes went looking for all those marathoners who supposedly keeled over from too little to drink, he found…

  None.

  Not one. Ever. “There is not a single report in the medical literature of dehydration being a proven, direct cause of death in a marathon runner,” Noakes discovered.

  But if you look at runners who had plenty to drink, that’s a different story. That’s where the bodies turn up. In the United States, three marathoners died on days that weren’t extraordinarily warm. In the UK, a fitness instructor in excellent shape and known for advising his own clients about hydration was dead soon after running the London Marathon. In the same race, a sports scientist with expertise in endurance conditioning became so delusional that she kept running in place while lying on a stretcher. Eight trekkers dropped into comas and never recovered while hiking the Kokoda Trail, a popular route for Australians on Papua New Guinea. For all of them, fluids weren’t just available—they were unavoidable, just as they were at the Houston Marathon in 2000 when dozens were rushed to the medical tent, even though drinks were handed out every single mile.

  None of these people were fleeing for their lives. None of them were pursuing food across the savanna. So if they were slowly dying of thirst, why on earth didn’t they just pick up a cup? How could they be so blind to their own doom? Shipwreck victims survive on life rafts for weeks; how did these athletes die within a few hours?

  Noakes was baffled. And then it hit him: they were drowning. Instead of too little to drink, they were dying from too much. They’d gulped so much fluid, they’d diluted their blood sodium concentration and caused their brains to swell. Water poisoning! Suddenly it all made sense. The Sports Drink Giants had been fantastically successful at tricking people into believing that, unlike every other creature on Earth, humans were too stupid to know when to drink. Cows and puppies and infants have it covered, but not you—no, you need to be told. The terrible irony was that by inventing a fake health scare, the Drink Giants had created a real one. They’d scared people into believing they were drinking too little, and fooled them into drinking too much. It was death by marketing.

  Noakes found twelve confirmed deaths by water poisoning in sports events and thousands of close calls. “The ‘Science of Hydration’ is propaganda conceived by marketers who wished to turn a collection of kitchen chemicals into a multi-billion dollar industry,” Noakes declared. “To their credit, they succeeded. To their unending shame, they cost the lives of some of those they were pretending to protect.”

  The scam was so outrageous, Noakes was sure it would explode as soon as it was revealed. Instead, he found himself battling the “Mafia of Science,” as he calls it: doctors and researchers funded by corporate war chests. The more Noakes insisted the Drink Giants were a lethal menace, the more the Drink Giants and their paid Ph.D.’s blasted the message that humans were frail creatures who couldn’t trust their own bodies. “Drink before you’re thirsty or you’ll just be playing catch-up,” the Gatorade camp insisted. “Drink before, during and after exercise.” When Asker Jeukendrup published a study that showed sports drinks are basically placebos—you can swish and spit and get the same benefit as if you’d swallowed—Gatorade knew just what to do: it hired him. As for Noakes—well, the Mafia of Science regretted that such a respected scientist was now just a mouthy crank. True, Noakes was possibly the world’s top authority on distance-running physiology, but his warnings about excess hydration were just “one man’s opinion,” as the director of the Gatorade Sports Science Institute sniffed, and “not representative of the comprehensive research that is available on the topic of hydration during exercise.”

  Noakes persisted, gathering evidence from around the world for Waterlogged, his four-hundred-plus-page indictment of the sportsdrink industry. On the night he wrote the last sentence, in December 2010, he went to bed thinking, Tomorrow, you’ve got to start running again. He’d been absorbed in work for too long. He hadn’t run a marathon in four years. He’d put on thirty pounds. And he was about to wake up to a sickening discovery:

  His own advice about carbs was killing him.

  —

  It was that first run that opened his eyes. Noakes got up as planned and huffed out a few miles, hating every step. He felt fat and slow, as if he’d never run a step before. His father and brother had both died from diabetes, and Noakes knew from his thickening waist and increasing sluggishness that he was heading in the same direction. He’d always persuaded himself that running would keep his weight under control, but now the misery of starting all over again made him face the truth: it wasn’t going to work. It had never worked.

  “In forty-one years of running I have learnt that the numerous benefits of exercise do not include any sustained effects on weight loss,” Noakes realized. Even during his peak of nearly twenty miles a day, back in the seventies, he’d lost only a few pounds and yo-yoed them right back on again. His medical training told him that exercise and calorie control should do the trick, but after four decades as a conscientious eater and athlete, he was living proof that his medical training was wrong. With his book out of the way and his genetic time bomb ticking, Noakes set out to find out what was going on.

  He began digging into nutrition sc
ience with the same intensity with which he’d gone after drinks, examining the primary research behind the dietary guidelines. What he found made Noakes angry, then heartsick. He’d been duped. Even worse: the whole time he’d been so self-righteous during his holy war with the Drink Giants, he’d been the instrument of something even deadlier. The food industry had pulled the same trick as the Drink Giants, and Noakes hadn’t only missed it; he’d endorsed it. For decades, he’d advocated a carbohydrate-rich diet. He was so influential, he’d been dubbed the High Priest of Carbo-Loading—and processed carbs, he now understood, were toxic.

  “Skillful marketing has made carbohydrate consumption a religion among athletes,” he’d fume. “They believe that you cannot get energy from anywhere but carbs.” The same foods Noakes had assured people would make them stronger and faster were a slow-acting poison making them fatter, weaker, and more prone to heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, and dementia.

  Privately, Noakes was anguished for another reason. It wasn’t well known, but Noakes’s father had made his fortune as a tobacco broker. In medical school autopsies, Noakes had seen firsthand the kind of horror his father’s profession wreaked on human bodies. He’d been troubled by Big Tobacco’s stealth efforts to increase addiction and market to minors, and it gnawed at him that every time his father cut a check to pay his school fees, it was at the cost of “the ill-health of those who smoked cigarettes containing the tobacco he exported.” In the end, Noakes’s father begged him to make amends. “Tim, I did not help enough people in my life,” his father told him. “You had better do so.”