* * *
—
The rest of May, we lived in the maze.
Flower quickly picked up on our new routine. I didn’t even have to steer her toward the creek anymore; within two days of trying out that new trail, she began beelining for it as soon as we’d gone half a mile down the gravel road. As much as she mistrusted water, she adored the playground on the other side. The feel of dirt beneath the donkeys’ hooves must have put jumper cables on some dormant DNA from their ancestral past on the African savannah and shocked it back to life, because as soon as they climbed that creek bank, they went wild. We’d sprint along with them as best we could, sometimes keeping up, sometimes dropping the rope and letting them go, always knowing that eventually we’d find them waiting somewhere ahead on the trail.
We’d pop out of the woods at the foot of the Big One, the long climb up Slate Hill Road leading to the maze, and right away I’d feel the bull’s-eye on my back. Flower and I led the way, with Sherman and Zeke champing at our heels. I could almost feel their breath on my neck, and I knew why: Sherman wanted to stay close to Flower, but Zeke was dying to shoot ahead. He and Sherman had become an amazing team over the past few months, mostly because Zeke had become a wizard at reading Shermie’s signals. Sometimes on our days off, I’d find Zeke’s car in our driveway but no Zeke. He’d be out in the pasture somewhere with Sherman, either showing him to friends or just hanging out on his own, sitting in the grass and sharing apple slices. Zeke’s mom used to secretly tail him to make sure he was really going to therapy, but she breathed easily when he set off to see Sherman because she knew he couldn’t wait to get over here. Zeke was getting to know Sherman better than any of us, but when it came to the Big One, Sherman had to figure out Zeke.
I knew what was going on, and I kind of dug it. We were flowing way better up the Big One these days, partly because of Eric’s speedwork drills but also because Flower now knew that the quicker she got to the top, the sooner she’d be back in the woods. Sherman was doing terrific at hanging tough; he had to work twice as hard as Flower to stay by her side, but for him it was worth it because there was no place on earth he’d rather be. So why the hell, Sherm had to wonder, is this blond kid constantly busting my hump to get by her? Sherman couldn’t see that Zeke wasn’t gunning for him; he was gunning for me. I didn’t have to look back to guess exactly what Zeke was thinking: “C’mon, man. I was a nationally ranked swimmer. I used to backstroke farther than this—and faster!—and now I’m stuck behind some fifty-four-year-old hogging the passing lane?” The Big One was the perfect place for Zeke to cut loose and show his stuff—except that his shaggy partner had different plans.
Tough luck, amigo. Welcome to burro racing.
Zeke always pretended he wasn’t trying to pass us, while I pretended not to notice. I’m a Philly guy who cut his teeth playing pickup hoops, so shit talk is my mother tongue, but I never ripped Zeke about our secret daily showdowns, or even mentioned them. Something was going very right with him and Sherman, and I didn’t want to ruin the spell. Every day that they both felt strong and spunky enough to come after me and Flower was a good day for all of us.
* * *
—
Luckily, the maze stays cool even when it’s stinking hot, which was good news for us as May became June, and June became an outdoor sauna. We dodged the heat as best we could by sticking to the woods, exploring so many of the maze’s twisting trails that after two weeks Flower knew the place better than I did. I’d hesitate whenever we hit a split in the trail, but Flower just surged on, never doubting which way to go and never making a mistake. Barb Dolan had told me that would happen (“If there’s a rock or a tree stump that spooks them, believe me, they’ll remember it a year later”), but I never really believed her till I saw it myself.
Our miles were keeping pace with the heat; as the thermometer climbed, so did our long runs, increasing in distance until we could comfortably handle ten miles. Or not so comfortably: one morning, we lingered a little too long over Zeke’s second breakfast and our third coffee and didn’t get out the door until nearly eleven. Zeke and I had learned our lesson from Mika and were carrying waist-strap water bottles, but it was such a steamer that by the middle of the workout, all three of us were dry.
“As soon as we hit direct sun everything spiraled out of control,” Zeke said when we stopped for a break. “Like watching the Hindenburg in slow motion.”
“Let’s bust out of here and head for the waterfall as soon as Mika gets here,” I said—except there was no Mika. A few moments later, Matilda trotted up alone. I left the donkeys with Zeke while I jogged back down the trail to make sure she was okay. A few hundred yards away, I spotted Mika with her head down and hands on her hips. “I think I’m done for today,” she said. We took our time walking back to the donkeys, but between the heat and the lack of lunch, she was still feeling woozy.
“You guys go ahead and finish on your own,” she said. “I’ll walk it in with Matilda.”
Before I could answer, Zeke piped up. “No way,” he said, shaking his head nope, nope, nope. “We start together, we finish together.”
The kindness was from his heart, but the words were from his Wednesday-night side hustle. Coach Eric had told us to add speedwork on our off days, and all three of us had found a way to embrace the speed but lop off the work. Zeke’s approach was to follow the Bubba-the-Goat model of, essentially, berserkering around the backyard and dancing on cars. He’d become a member of a parkour gang*2 that trains every Wednesday after nightfall in downtown Lancaster. Zeke loved the way parkour traceurs use the city as their gym, training in alleys and climbing the walls of parking garages. He was still a novice, but already he was discovering that parkour moves like Thief Vaults, Muscle-Ups, Tic Tacs, and Double Kongs were adding a big boost of agility, stamina, and upper-body strength to his donkey running. Parkour prizes craft and camaraderie over competition, and as an awkward newcomer who sometimes lagged behind, Zeke was touched that seasoned traceurs always circled back to make sure he never finished a workout alone.
* * *
—
Zeke by night was now Spider-Man–ing around the city. Zeke by day, whenever he wasn’t with us, was disappearing into the deep woods to squat in the creek. As his second side gig, Zeke had become a student of “the Iceman”: Wim Hof, the Dutch cold-water guru. Zeke was intrigued by Wim’s peculiar approach to depression, but what really hooked him was the science. If Wim’s theories were legit, Zeke could use cold exposure in a way the Iceman himself had never envisioned.
Wim Hof spent most of his life as an unknown eccentric living on a houseboat in Amsterdam—until one day he was caught on camera leaping into a frozen canal to save the life of a man who’d crashed through the ice. The victim had to be rushed to emergency care, but balding, bearded Wim emerged relaxed and refreshed, as if he’d just enjoyed a dip in the pool. Which he essentially had; even in the middle of winter, Wim will cut a hole in the ice and slip in for a daily swim. He became so comfortable in deadly cold that he began tearing up world records: He swam nearly two hundred feet under sheer ice to set one mark; ran a marathon barefoot and nearly naked in subzero weather in Finland; climbed higher than Mount Everest’s “death zone” barefooted and wearing nothing but shorts; and somehow raised his core body temperature while submerged in ice for more than ninety minutes.
During his lifetime of research and one-man experimentation, the Iceman came to believe that cold plunges were a lost secret of supreme health, and he makes a compelling case. Our ancestors were always chilled to the bone, he points out. Homes were damp and drafty, work was done out in the wind, and waterproof clothing was a madman’s fantasy. To live was to shiver, but we did have one thing going for us: in a terrific bit of evolutionary jujitsu, our bodies adapted to the cold so that the same frost that could kill us could also make us calmer, stronger, and healthier. It all came down to oxygen: muc
h the way you build a fire by blowing on it, you can crank up your internal furnace by sucking in air. That’s why you gasp and shriek when someone pushes you into the pool; the cold shock triggers your lungs into hyperdrive, accelerating your circulatory system. Super-oxygenating your blood not only warms you up, but calms you down; and because a clear head helps you survive in dire straits, your brain quickly releases soothing hormones to help you (ahem) chill out.
Put it all together, Wim Hof proclaims, and you’ll see why an occasional blast of cold should be treasured, not avoided. We inherited a tremendous gift, but we became so focused on constant coziness that we missed the connection between temporary discomfort and lifelong health. Instead of keeping our bodies adapted to cold, we cocoon ourselves in climate-controlled bubbles. We leave our toasty homes to travel in cars with heated seats to our jobs in thermostatically controlled offices, and if we exercise at all, it’s in a gym that’s so hot, even Child’s Pose makes you sweat.
But big medicine is just a cold plunge away, Wim says. To prove it, he bared his arm and challenged doctors to make him puke. In 2010, Wim allowed Dutch medical researchers to inject him with a bacterial strain of E.coli that causes fever, vomiting, and headaches. Wim believed he could control his immune system with the same focused breathing that insulated him from subzero weather. He was injected…and felt dandy. So researchers at Holland’s Radboud University Medical Center upped the ante and recruited twenty-four volunteers. Twelve were trained by Wim, twelve were not, and then all twenty-four were injected with the same noxious bacteria. Wim’s students came out fine; on average, they had almost no reaction and showed higher levels of an anti-inflammatory protein, while the other twelve got sick.
The Iceman soon became a favorite space monkey for researchers around the world. He was fitted with a special ice-water suit and fed into an MRI to map his brain functions, then a PET scan to study his body tissue and capillaries. His brown and white body fat ratios were analyzed, his cortisol levels were graphed, his hormone secretions were measured. Harvard Business Review even zeroed in on Wim to find out why workers who take cold showers are less likely to call in sick. All of the studies dissected different parts of the Wim Hof puzzle, but their results essentially pointed to the same conclusion: if you want to burn fat, relieve depression, get stronger, increase mobility, and stay healthier, you might want to start with blue lips.
The secret, the researchers hypothesize, might be the breathing: Wim takes his students through a twenty-minute hyperventilation drill, which helps insulate them from the cold but may also trigger their sympathetic nervous systems and their immune response. For more than a decade, the Iceman’s self-healing strategy has been embraced by people seeking help with obesity, diabetes, severe arthritis, and even the crippling cramps and tremors of Parkinson’s, and the feedback has been so overwhelmingly enthusiastic that even top athletes, like surfing legends Kelly Slater and Laird Hamilton, have become disciples.
“Oxygen fires every cell in your body,” Laird says. “Breath is what dictates the failure. If you look at any fighter, any athlete, as soon as they start mouth-breathing, panting, they’re done. You can do without food for weeks, without water for days, but cut off the oxygen, and you’re gone in minutes. Breathing is your power.”
* * *
—
Zeke was trying to assemble the ingredients for his own Iceman hack when he hit pay dirt one afternoon in the woods. He was out for a solo run in the forest along the River Hills, and while following a creek that sliced beneath a soaring stone cliff, he found a deep plunge pool. He shucked off his running sandals and tested the temperature with his foot. The hole was so sheltered by trees and boulders that even on that hot spring day the water was as shocking as fresh-melt snow.
Oh my god, that’s torture, Zeke thought. It’s perfect.
Zeke slid in up to his chin. He stayed in the water as long as he could, then warmed up by running through the woods to the sunny Pinnacle overlook, the highest point in the Southern End. That evening, he went online and memorized the three specific steps of Wim Hof’s breathing drills (thirty to forty power breaths; deep exhale and hold; deep inhale and hold; repeat for three more rounds). The next afternoon, Zeke was back in the woods. He lay on the creek bank while he executed his power breaths, then waded into the ice bath. Brutal! He wasn’t sure if this would work for the long term. But short term, he’d certainly learned that your mind can’t dwell on dark thoughts when it’s screaming for you to get the hell out of this meat locker.
Zeke also knew that in London, an entire subculture of naked city swimmers had stumbled onto the Iceman’s secret about three hundred years before the Iceman was born. In Hampstead Heath, London’s giant public park, a cluster of spring-fed ponds was dug back in the 1700s, and ever since then, swimmers have trudged through snow to splash around in them even during the most bitter British winters. “After even a brief swim, I feel elated for hours and calm for days,” explained Dr. Chris van Tulleken, a physician who was so invigorated by his own polar-bear plunges that he began experimenting with cold-water swims instead of pharmaceuticals as a treatment for some of his patients with depression. Sarah, for instance, was a twenty-four-year-old woman who’d been on antidepressants since she was seventeen but hated the feeling of living in a “chemical fog.”
“She saw an immediate improvement in her mood after each swim and, as the weeks went by, her symptoms lessened,” Dr. van Tulleken has said. Two years later, she’s still off medication. Dr. van Tulleken shared his findings with two scientists who specialize in extreme environment performance, and together they published a study in BMJ Case Reports suggesting that a few frosty laps in the pool might be an effective treatment for major depressive disorder—which means those old Victorian codgers doffing their togs to break through the ice in the Hampstead ponds whenever they felt a bit of the “black bile” coming on might have had a better grasp of mental health than we do. Many of the outdoor swimmers interviewed by the researchers, in fact, said they began “in times of grief or bereavement and found comfort, even joy, in the water.”
Zeke latched on to another tantalizing detail. The study’s blockbuster news was the idea that a few minutes in a cold shower could be a remedy for such a deadly and baffling disease, but there was also a secondary effect. It was included in the case study almost as an afterthought, as if the researchers were apologizing because really, it had nothing to do with depression but appealed to them personally since they were experts on extreme performance. “Response to the stress of exercising at altitude is also diminished,” Dr. van Tulleken noted. “This is called ‘cross-adaptation,’ where one form of stress adapts the body for another.” Maybe, he speculated, learning to handle the shock of cold water would also “blunt your stress response to other daily stresses such as road rage, exams, or getting fired at work.”
But that was thinking small. Zeke was thinking big. Cross-adaptation is more than medicine, he realized. It’s rocket fuel. No wonder the Iceman was able to train dozens of amateur trekkers at a time and lead them on bare-chested expeditions up Mount Kilimanjaro at breakneck speed. Wim’s success rate for these group climbs was astonishing: year after year, more than 90 percent of his students would reach the peak, despite the fact that many of them came to him because they’d been infirm or chronically ill. But here they are, stripping down to shorts and scampering nearly 20,000 feet up Africa’s highest peak, and instead of suffering altitude sickness, they’re hugging and high-fiving and breaking world records for group climbs. You never know what the mountain will throw at you, but by learning to breathe deeply, they’d found a way to conquer thin air, self-doubt, confusion, and exhaustion.
Wim didn’t know it, Zeke told himself as he shivered in the creek, but he had also come up with a blueprint to build a better burro racer.
* * *
—
Maybe. But as far as Mika was concerned, the bottom of Zek
e’s swimming hole could be covered in pirate chests and platinum cards and there was still no way in hell she was going in. She would do just about anything to help Sherman, but after growing up on the beaches of Oahu, she drew the line at cold plunges in Pennsylvania creeks. Besides, she’d already found a guiding light of her own. Mika had become fascinated by Krissy Moehl, the champion ultrarunner who began beating men after she stopped thinking like them.
Krissy was twenty-two years old, fresh out of college and working in a running-shoe store in Seattle, when she began exploring the trails around town with one of her coworkers: Scott Jurek, the super-talent who would go on to win nearly every crown in the sport. Krissy didn’t have big miles under her belt at the time; as a collegiate 800-meter runner, she was used to races being over in two minutes. But she had so much fun on those long rambles around Alpine Lakes in Olympic National Park that it wasn’t long before Scott persuaded her to jump into her first 50K. Even before the starting gun, Krissy realized she’d made a big mistake. Track had taught her that racing is agonizing and unforgiving, a self-esteem killer that torments your nerves the day before and your body the day after. What kind of beating she’d get from five hours in the mountains, she didn’t even want to imagine.
Krissy didn’t need that misery anymore. For the first time in her life, she wasn’t competing for her school, her coaches, or her team. She was running only for herself. So she should enjoy it, right? But was it possible to push hard and have fun at the same time? Krissy gave it a lot of thought, and decided the only chance she had of sticking with the sport was to follow three rules:
#1 Smile from gun to tape.
Running with Sherman Page 26