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

by Christopher McDougall

  It’s not our muscles. Chimpanzees are extraordinary athletes and proportionately much stronger, but even though they’re our closest genetic cousins, they’re rotten pitchers. You can train a chimp to throw, but the most heat he’ll ever muster is about twenty miles per hour. For a Little Leaguer, that’s a joke; twelve-year-old boys can throw three times as fast, with much sharper precision. Softball star Jennie Finch routinely tops seventy miles per hour, and that’s underhand.

  So what do we have that chimps don’t? A shoulder full of “rubbery gunk”—fascia and ligaments and stretchy tendons. Cocking your arm, Roach explains, is like pulling back a slingshot. “When this energy is then released, it powers the very rapid rotation of the upper arm, which is the fastest motion the human body produces—up to nine thousand degrees [of rotation] per second in professional pitchers!” A fast throw isn’t just muscular effort, but a three-stage uncoiling of elastic force:

  Step with the foot opposite the throwing hand.

  Rotate your hips, then your shoulders.

  And whip, by popping the joints in the arm, wrist, and hand.

  We weren’t always equipped with such howitzers, Roach adds. About two million years ago, our ancestors developed a few key structural changes that changed us from climbers and scavengers into living catapults: our waists got a little wider, our shoulders a little lower, our wrists more flexible, and our upper arms a bit more rotated. Once we got the hang of our wobble power and learned to put a point on a stick, we became not only the deadliest creature on the planet, but the smartest. The better we threw, the more intelligent we became.

  “This ability to produce powerful throws was crucial to the intensification of hunting,” Roach explains. “Success at hunting allowed our ancestors to become part-time carnivores, eating more calorie-rich meat and fat and dramatically improving the quality of their diet. This dietary change led to seismic shifts in our ancestors’ biology, allowing them to grow larger bodies, larger brains, and to have more children.”

  Bigger brains led to a revolutionary new skill, one that would become the foundation of all human achievement: we learned to aim not only where food was, but where food wasn’t. Kudus and rabbits dart off in mad zigzags, meaning a hunter has to mentally process the timing and distance of three different bodies moving through space—his own, his prey’s, and his weapon’s—to calculate the exact point where spear meets quarry. Or where Allied gunshot meets German paratrooper, on Crete.

  “That kind of sequential thought requires intellect of a higher order,” says William H. Calvin, Ph.D., a professor of neurobiology at the University of Washington and a specialist in the evolution of the human brain. Specifically, he’s talking about imagination: the ability to project into the future, visualize possibilities, think in the abstract. That’s why Calvin believes language, literature, medicine, and even love are all connected to our ancient ability to hit a hare at twenty paces. “Throwing is about finding order in chaos,” he says. “The more you’re able to think in sequence, the more ideas you’re able to string together. You can add more words to your vocabulary, you can combine unrelated concepts, you can plan for the future, and you can keep track of social relationships.”

  But wait: aren’t sequence thinking and idea combining the kind of tinkering there’s no time for in a race for survival? Exactly; and that’s why, when it came to throwing tomahawks, I was better off with a blindfold. With primal functions, education and execution don’t mix. Your brain processes the movement, but your body carries it out. So once you’ve grooved a move into your fascia, get out of its way. It reacts—and remembers.

  CHAPTER 11

  Things you do,

  Come back to you,

  As though they knew the way.

  —RODGERS AND HART, “Where or When”

  TOMAHAWKS AND SPEARS weren’t the weapons of choice for the Firm, but luckily, wobble power works just as well with a finger. When the Heavenly Twins began training Churchill’s first class of dirty tricksters, Bill Fairbairn showed them how it’s done.

  Fairbairn yanked his pistol and clenched it like…well, like an idiot. He didn’t even aim the thing. Everyone knows you have to lock out your arms and steady the pistol with both hands as you peer down the sights. But Fairbairn just stood there, his knees bent as though they were about to buckle. He clutched the pistol as if he were trying to crush it in his fist and barely raised it to his waist. He looked nothing like an expert marksman or a seasoned cop. He looked more like a confused old man who suddenly found a pistol in his pocket and had no idea how it got there.

  Now this, he said, is how you win a gunfight. You’re crazy if you think you won’t be terrified when you face a man who’s trying to kill you, Fairbairn explained, but that’s okay; humans are terrific at turning terror into a weapon. You just need to tap into your natural ability to aim by instinct. Fairbairn believed “instinctive aim” is what made Wild West gunslingers so deadly, and one of his protégés actually went west to find out. Rex Applegate was a U.S. Army lieutenant with unusual credentials; as a boy in Yoncalla, Oregon, he’d chucked bricks in the air as targets for his uncle, a professional trick-shot artist. “These people did not use the sights for many of their acts,” Applegate noted—yet when he joined the Army, he found that old-timers like his uncle were better shots than his instructors. Frontiersmen like Wild Bill Hickok had heavier weapons and no formal training, but their quick-draw skills were astonishing.

  “Wild Bill was an authentic Western gunman who actually killed a lot of men in combat,” Applegate learned. “I was still searching for that essential fact: how did they do it?” The Army assigned Applegate to study close-combat techniques, and one of his first stops was Wild Bill’s final stomping grounds, in Deadwood, South Dakota. In the county courthouse, Applegate found a packet of Wild Bill’s papers. “One was a letter from an admirer asking in effect, ‘How did you kill these men? What was your method or technique?’ ” Applegate relates. “That was exactly what I was looking for.” Luckily, Hickok had never mailed his response. In Hickok’s own handwriting, Applegate read: “I raised my hand to eye level, like pointing a finger, and fired.”

  Like pointing a finger…“This was very intriguing,” Applegate would recall, “but it wasn’t made clear to me until I started my training in combat handgun techniques under a couple of gentlemen named William E. Fairbairn and Eric A. Sykes.” The Twins, it turned out, had come up with the same technique after a lucky accident. One night, fifteen of their Shanghai policemen had raided a crime gang’s headquarters. When Fairbairn inspected the building the next morning, he found it ringed with head-high booby-trap wires. His officers had passed right under without seeing them. In a flash of insight, Fairbairn understood why: whenever they tensed, they instinctively dropped into a crouch. It must be the same reason, Fairbairn realized, they also clutched their pistols in a death grip.

  “You will be keyed up to the highest pitch and will be grasping your pistol with almost convulsive force. If you have to fire, your instinct will be to do it as quickly as possible, and you will probably do it with a bent arm, possibly even from the level of the hip. The whole affair may take place in a bad light or none at all,” Fairbairn predicted. “It may be that a bullet whizzes past you and that you will experience momentary stupefaction, which is due to the shock of the explosion at very short range of the shot just fired by your opponent.”

  What Fairbairn was observing would be identified years later as the Sympathetic Nervous System response, more commonly known as the fight-or-flight reflex. Your knees bend, your heart pounds, your hands clench and jerk up in front of you, your vision tunnels toward one threat, and your body squares to face it. This is your lower brain—your animal self—coiling you like a spring to either strike or sprint for cover. Before Fairbairn arrived in Shanghai, police guidelines dictated you should ignore your animal self and get composed before shooting. But while you’re composing, the other guy is firing. “If you take much longer than a third
of a second to fire your first shot,” Fairbairn warned, “you will not be the one to tell the newspaper about it.” No wonder nine Shanghai patrolmen were killed in a single year. “There is not time,” Fairbairn realized, “to put yourself into some special stance or to align the sights of the pistol, and any attempt to do so places you at the mercy of a quicker opponent.”

  You can’t fight natural instinct, he decided. But you can make natural instinct fight for you. So the Twins came up with a new, fear-as-a-weapon approach, and brought it with them when they returned to Britain. “The man who can use his weapon quickly and accurately from any position without using the sights is the one who will stand the best chance of not going out feet first,” the Twins announced. “It can be done and it is not so very difficult.” The trick is making your pistol an extension of your fascia. And for that, you only need to point your finger.

  When you sense menace, your body craves balance. That’s why a scare puts you instinctively into the pose of a tightrope walker—knees bent, hands up—but there’s another effect: your arm can locate a threat like a compass needle finding true north. The biomechanics make sense: to avoid getting knocked over by an attacker, your body weight has to be ready to instantly shift from two points of support—your feet on the ground—to three: your feet plus the attacker you’re about to hold at arm’s length. Your hand can’t wait for a command; it needs its own defensive directional system, a fascia-based response.

  Fairbairn called it “the impulse of the master-eye.” Pick a spot on the far wall, he’d instruct his recruits. Cock your thumb and finger like an imaginary pistol. Now pull—yank up your hand and quick-draw toward your target. Don’t think, don’t aim; just move. “Observe carefully now what has taken place,” Fairbairn would say. “Your forefinger, as intended, will be pointing to the mark you are facing squarely.” To convert that impulse into deadly force, Fairbairn concluded, you just need to point your gun the same way.

  “We were not taught to hold the gun out at arm’s length or with two hands but to draw the gun and hold it tucked into your navel with the gun pointing straight ahead,” one of the Twins’ students, Robert Sheppard, would explain. “Wherever you looked, your gun moved round towards the target you were looking at.” SOE recruits who’d handled a gun before bristled at the point-and-shoot system. It was ugly and humiliating. They didn’t look like brave lawmen, aiming carefully with locked-out arms and two firm hands. They looked like scared punks trying to sneak off a shot without getting spotted.

  But Fairbairn’s partner, Bill Sykes, knew how to deal with doubters. “I’ve seen that chap turn round with his back facing the target and hit the bull’s eye from between his legs,” Sheppard would recall. “I’ve seen him do that.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Now, Ah Hing, I’m going to teach you how to fight like a woman.

  —GRANDMASTER IP MAN, Bruce Lee’s teacher

  REX APPLEGATE got off to a bumpy start with the Twins. He was a massive guy—six foot three inches hardened into 230 pounds of muscle from a boyhood in Oregon logging towns—and so skilled with his fists and trigger finger that even as a young second lieutenant, he was handpicked by Colonel “Wild Bill” Donovan to teach stealth fighting to the espionage-and-sabotage unit that would become the Central Intelligence Agency.

  Word had it that two old Brits were the best gutter fighters in the world, so Wild Bill sent Applegate to find out what the Twins were up to. “We soon sized each other up,” Applegate recalled, and he was unimpressed. Maybe Fairbairn knew a little judo and was flashy with a pistol, but in a real scrap, Applegate would smother the shrimp. Fairbairn must have sensed what he was thinking, because during a demonstration he invited Applegate to come forward. “I want you to attack me,” Fairbairn offered. “Just like you were going to kill me.”

  Applegate was thirty years younger and nearly a hundred pounds heavier, but, more important, he knew how to dismantle these so-called martial artists: you psych them out with some noise, then run ’em over before they have time to set up any of their little flippy moves. “The first thing to do when on the offensive is to weaken the opponent’s balance mentally and physically,” Applegate explained. “I let out a roar and went for him.” The soldiers in the front row had to scramble out of the way as Applegate came sailing back at them. “I had been in some bar room brawls and held my own,” a stunned Applegate would recall. “It got my attention.”

  Whatever the Twins were teaching, it was different from anything Applegate had seen before. “We are reverting to the type of individual warfare of earlier times,” Fairbairn explained. Your strength won’t help, he told Applegate. Neither will boxing, wrestling, or most anything you might have learned in a karate dojo. Those are just games, with made-up rules and show-offy skills. You can break a board with your foot? Big deal; try it on the Twins and you’ll go home with that foot in a cast. You’re a Greco-Roman wrestling champion? Super; Fairbairn could cripple a wrestler as easily as he’d manhandled Applegate.

  “Stay on your feet,” Applegate learned. “A cardinal rule of this kind of combat is never go to the ground.”

  But wait—wouldn’t mixed martial artists later claim that 90 percent of all fights end up on the ground and win bouts all the time by bringing the action to the mat? Very true, Fairbairn would reply—and if you find yourself inside an octagon with a cushioned floor and a Brazilian in surf shorts, then go ahead and grapple. But in a real fight—with no rules, no ref, no tap-outs, no guarantee the other guy doesn’t have a weapon—the ground is where you go to die. If an attacker gets you down, you’d better grab his testicles, jam a thumb in his eyeball, tear his ear off with your teeth, whatever it takes to kick free and scramble back up so you can use the “Bronco Kick,” one of Fairbairn’s pet moves: jumping on the guy’s chest until his ribs are jelly. Real violence isn’t about sportsmanship, Fairbairn stressed; it’s about survival. You’re not shaking his hand and wishing him well. You’re hoping he’s still lying there when you leave.

  Boxing and wrestling aren’t natural forms of combat, the Twins explained. They’re natural forms of peacocking, created by and for men to showboat two unique male attributes: bulk and upper-body strength. Otherwise they’re useless. No human in the wild would ever throw a punch if he could avoid it, not even against another human. Why risk breaking all those fragile bones and knuckle joints, or jabbing out an arm that can be trapped, twisted, and snapped?

  But that’s not even the big red flag. There’s a more glaring giveaway that boxing and wrestling are just recreation: girls and old guys aren’t good at them. As a rule of thumb, performance aberration in a basic skill is a good way to evaluate whether it’s natural to a species. When you spot a giant ability gap between ages and genders, you know you’re looking at nurture, not nature. Male and female geese differ in size but not in speed; otherwise, migration would be mayhem. Same with trout: if males rocketed past the females, they’d always be first to eat, last to be eaten, and on their way to a disastrous shortage of spawning partners. Gender and age differences don’t disappear, of course, but they’re tremendously diminished.

  Especially among humans. Compared with other animals, men and women are remarkably alike. We’re roughly the same size and shape, and share the same biological weaponry. Men aren’t specially equipped with horns, fangs, or giant racks of antlers, like the males of other species, and they don’t dwarf women; men are only about 15 percent bigger, not 50 percent, like male gorillas. We need to be similar because for most of our existence we shared similar jobs. Humans survived for millions of years as hunter-gatherers, ranging across the terrain together in search of edible plants, digable roots, and catchable game. We worked together, and as couples we stayed together: humans choose one mate at a time, and we do it peacefully.

  That’s why our courtships are a dance, not a death match. Apes and elks battle for the right to reproduce and take multiple mates by force, but humans have a more runway-model approach: rather than fight, we flaunt. Men p
rimp themselves up to look like hearty specimens and sturdy providers, then wait for the women to make their choices. That’s one of the necessities of monogamy: apes can afford to tear one another apart, since the alpha male ends up with a harem. But in a system of one-to-one mating, courtship can’t conclude with half the males on life support.

  We’re creatures of restraint—of endurance and elasticity—and that’s where men and women, old and young, are most alike. When it comes to tests of endurance, like distance running and swimming, the performance difference between ages and genders is even smaller than the difference in our size: it’s only about 10 percent. A twenty-five-year-old man wasn’t the one who battled through fifty-three hours of jellyfish stings and bruising currents to become the first to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage; it was a senior citizen, sixty-four-year-old Diana Nyad. The fastest female ever to swim the twenty-three-plus-mile English Channel was just thirty minutes behind the fastest man, and a thirty-year-old bankruptcy lawyer named Amelia Boone nearly won the World’s Toughest Mudder obstacle race in 2012, covering ninety miles and more than three hundred obstacles to finish second overall and ten miles ahead of the guy in third. Middle-aged women are likewise no strangers to the lead pack in ultramarathons. Pam Reed was forty-one when she outran all the men to win the 135-mile Badwater ultra across Death Valley in 2002; the following year, she returned and did it again. Diana Finkel was just shy of forty when she led for the first ninety miles of the brutally hard Hardrock 100, finishing second overall.