“There’s a fairly sharp limit to the degree of muscularity that a man can attain without drugs,” Pope explains. “Most boys and men who exceed this limit, and who claim they did so without drugs, are lying.” Before the Rise of the Machines and the Dawn of the Super-Males, you went to the gym to become an athlete. Teddy Roosevelt focused on performance, not appearance, and it made him an athlete for life. Like all self-made men, he was afraid of backsliding, so even after he became president, Roosevelt stuck with what he learned at Wood’s: he boxed with soldiers, swam naked late at night in the Potomac, and squared off with his buddy, an army general, for bruising battles with wooden cudgels.
Some evenings, Roosevelt would slip out of the White House, pick a spot miles in the distance, and head straight for it. The challenge was to reach the goal no matter what obstacles were in the way. “On several occasions we thus swam Rock Creek in the early spring when the ice was floating thick upon it. If we swam the Potomac, we usually took off our clothes,” Roosevelt would recall. “We liked Rock Creek for these walks because we could do so much scrambling and climbing along the cliffs…Of course under such circumstances we had to arrange that our return to Washington should be when it was dark, so that our appearance might scandalize no one.”
Decades later, Roosevelt’s midnight rambles inspired one of the strangest fads of the Kennedy administration. After becoming president, John F. Kennedy was appalled to discover that half the young men called up for the draft were rejected as unfit. Americans were becoming dangerously soft and therefore, in Kennedy’s eyes, stupid. “Intelligence and skill can only function at the peak of their capacity when the body is healthy and strong,” Kennedy declared. “In this sense, physical fitness is the basis of all the activities of our society.” JFK was interested in true fitness, not bench presses or beach muscle, so he zeroed in on the two factors that matter most: endurance and elastic strength.
Thus began America’s weird, brief love affair with ultradistance. JFK found an old order from Teddy Roosevelt that required U.S. Marines to hike fifty miles or ride one hundred in less than seventy-two hours. (Teddy, naturally, led the way by doing the ride himself during a winter rainstorm.) Some of Teddy’s troops finished the hike in a single day, so JFK made that his challenge: Could modern Marines cover fifty miles of wild terrain in twenty-four hours? But before the military could give the command, civilians—including Kennedy’s own kid brother—beat them to it. At 5 A.M. one freezing Sunday in February, Bobby Kennedy set off with four Justice Department aides to hike the C&O towpath from D.C. to Harpers Ferry. All four aides dropped out, but by midnight Bobby had hiked fifty miles in less than eighteen hours.
The race was on. College frats, Boy Scout troops, high school classes, postmen and policemen, “pretty secretaries” and “beautiful girls” (as U.S. News & World Report put it) all tackled the “Kennedy Challenge.” Congressional staffers marched off in mobs, and a pub in Massachusetts offered free beer at the finish of its own fifty-miler. “The 50-mile hike verges on insanity,” warned the National Recreation Association, and the doom prediction was seconded by the American Medical Association: “We get distressed when people go out and strain themselves.” News photographers fanned out to capture the carnage—and instead found the same expression on faces across the country: grins of pride. People who’d never moved their legs for more than an hour at a stretch were thrilled to discover that just by heading out the door, they could keep on going. Speed records tumbled: Bobby Kennedy was beaten by a high school girl in California, who was edged out by a fifty-eight-year-old postman in New Jersey, who was bested by a Marine who smoked it home in under ten hours.
Kennedy’s murder brought the armies of Challengers to a halt—except in one small town in Maryland, where the same shock of personal discovery has been playing out every year since 1963. Only four people finished the first race. Seven the next. Eighteen after that. But while all the other Kennedy Challenges died away, Boonsboro kept getting stronger. It’s a tough race; the JFK 50 sends you up the steep and rocky Appalachian Trail and then down long switchbacks to the C&O towpath to follow in Bobby Kennedy’s footsteps. A half-century later, Boonsboro is still holding fast to Kennedy’s vision. Now, nearly a thousand entrants set off on the Saturday before Thanksgiving to discover for themselves what Kennedy suspected from the beginning: if we have the confidence to start, we’ll find what we need to finish.
The JFK 50 is no longer the country’s longest race, and it’s never been the sexiest. Big-city marathons have rock bands and movie stars; Tough Mudders have Arctic Enema ice-water plunges and mud scrambles and electric-shock hazards; while the JFK has…silence. For long, lonely stretches, it’s just you and your doubts. No cheering, no glimpses of Pamela Anderson and Will Ferrell, no victory lap through Central Park. But like one of those old family diners dwarfed by new sky-rises, JFK survives for a reason: it’s where soldiers and Marines are honored as elites, and a thirteen-year-old girl who’s told she’s too young for the New York City Marathon can run a double through the mountains instead. It’s where Zach Miller, an unknown cruise-ship worker who trains on a treadmill at sea, could shock even himself in 2012 by uncorking one of the greatest performances in the race’s history. The JFK could have been designed by Teddy Roosevelt and Georges Hébert; it’s the kind of enduring testament to the spirit of natural movement—to proficiency and purpose—that you rarely find anymore.
Unless, of course, you’re in Brazil. Down here, another route to excellence has been dusted off from the past. It’s been lost for so long, it now sounds exotic and oddly stirring. And one of the few who still know how it’s done—how to be fit to be useful—has just jumped out my window and is waiting impatiently below to lead me into the jungle.
CHAPTER 28
The athlete that you remember is the beautiful dancing athlete.
—EDWARD VILLELLA,
undefeated welterweight boxer and lead dancer in the New York City Ballet
ERWAN LE CORRE and I are staying in a small cabana hotel in the woods, built by a French hippie couple who came to Itacaré twenty years ago to explore the jungle and never left. From behind the cabanas, a smooth dirt trail wanders over the forested hills and down to the beach, about three miles away. As much for his mind as for his body, Erwan likes to run it barefoot. Awareness of the world begins with your feet, he believes.
“Do you know why you get stressed after staring at your computer for a half-hour?” Erwan asks after I join him outside. “Because humans evolved to always be aware of threats around them. That stress you feel building up is your body’s reminder to get up and take a look at the landscape. Same with your feet—if you’re not letting them do their job and tell your back and knees when they can relax, then your body stays stiff, giving you knee problems and backaches.” Your bare feet can sense when you’re balanced and on solid terrain, in other words, so they can signal to the rest of your body that it’s safe and can loosen up a little.
We set off at an easy jog, winding through the trees until we emerge on a serene half-moon of beach just as the first slants of morning sun slash across the waves. We have it all to ourselves—until a gang of men emerges from the trees behind us.
“Mais uma vítima!” shouts a tattooed bruiser who looks like he just escaped a prison yard. “Another victim!”
Erwan glances around. He spots a bowling-ball-size rock on the sand. With a quick crouch, he scoops it up and snaps it with a sharp, two-handed throw straight at the bruiser’s chest. Instead of diving out of the way, the guy catches the rock like it was a basketball, tosses it aside, and comes right at Erwan, raising his fist and growling like a grizzly. They lock arms around each other’s necks, then break apart, grinning.
“He’s no victim,” Erwan says in Portuguese, jerking his head toward me. “He’s a work in progress. Like you.” Erwan introduces me to his buddy Serginho, a burly jiu-jitsu instructor who moonlights as a spearfisherman. The other seven guys are stripping off shirts and kicking o
ff flip-flops, ready to get down to business.
Erwan wandered here from his home near Paris more than a year ago and quickly realized Itacaré had all the natural training apparatus that Georges Hébert would have loved, plus the perfect band of collaborators: a small community of Brazilian fighters who support themselves by moonlighting as surfing instructors and spearfishing guides. It’s an ideal alliance: the fighters help sharpen Erwan’s grappling and swimming skills, while Erwan dreams up new ways to frustrate the hell out of them.
Zuqueto can attest to that. Zuqueto is a two-time jiu-jitsu world champion and a free diver who once killed a shark using only a scuba knife and a lungful of air. But the afternoon before, Zuqueto had met his match. Erwan had lashed a long bamboo pole between two trees, forming a bouncy balance beam about eight feet long and as high as my head. Erwan swung himself up, then beckoned Zuqueto to join him.
“What are you waiting for?” Erwan taunted. Zuqueto grabbed the pole with two meaty fists, muscled himself up like a swimmer getting out of a pool, and…lost his balance and fell back to the ground. He leaped again and again, while Erwan amused himself by hopping from foot to foot. When Zuqueto finally stepped back, his chest heaving in fatigue and frustration, Erwan hopped down. He grabbed Zuqueto by both shoulders and gave him a friendly, tousling shake.
“This guy is in amazing shape,” Erwan said. “He’s strong and has great endurance. But what happened here? All he had to do was get on top of this pole, and he couldn’t. I can do it. Zuqueto’s great-grandfather could probably do it. At one point in time, just about every man alive could do it. But Zuqueto can’t. And why? Because his body isn’t smart enough.”
A “smart body,” Erwan explains, knows how to convert force and speed into an almost endless menu of practical movements. Hoisting yourself atop a pole may seem trivial, but if you’re ever caught in a flood or fleeing an attacking dog, elevating your body five feet off the ground can make all the difference. “I meet men all the time who can bench four hundred pounds but can’t climb up through a window to get someone out of a burning building,” he continued. “I know guys who can run marathons but can’t sprint to anyone’s rescue until they put their shoes on first. Lots of swimmers do laps every morning but can’t dive deep enough to save a friend, or know how to carry him over rocks to get him out of the surf.”
Erwan was talking with his back to the pole. Without warning, he pivoted and launched himself into the air. He caught the pole on the fly, arched under it to gain momentum, and then, just before his mount, he slowed enough for us to follow his moves. He twisted his hips and knees, rising like a surfer catching a wave. He hopped down, light as a cat, and mounted the pole two…three…six more times, using his elbows, ankles, shoulders, and neck to create new climbing combinations.
“Being fit isn’t about being able to lift a steel bar or finish an Ironman,” Erwan said. “It’s about rediscovering our biological nature and releasing the wild human animal inside.” He stepped back so Zuqueto could try again, and grinned with satisfaction as Zuqueto maneuvered himself up and found his balance, pumping his fist in the air like he’d won his third world championship.
—
This is what I came to find: the Natural Method in its natural habitat. Georges Hébert had made some pretty powerful promises about what it could do, and if he was right, it might just explain how Paddy and the other Brits on Crete accomplished something that most of the other dirty tricksters couldn’t: seeing their next birthday.
In the operation’s first year alone, more than half of Xan and Paddy’s fellow members of the Special Operations Executive on the Continent were killed, captured, or otherwise eliminated. One SOE agent was assigned to infiltrate the Riviera’s casinos but mysteriously vanished—along with a briefcase full of cash—before he could lay a bet. In Holland, an SOE radioman was captured by the Gestapo and forced at gunpoint to send messages that lured other agents to their death. In Austria, one of the SOE’s top men—Alfgar Hesketh-Prichard, the best “mathematical brain of his age in England” and son of a legendary army sniper—hiked into the mountains and never hiked out. “This is no place for a gentleman,” he messaged before disappearing. In France, Gus March-Phillipps revealed a spectacular talent for sneaking up on solitary German soldiers and hauling them back to Britain as prisoners. “There comes out of the sea from time to time a hand of steel which plucks the German sentries from their posts with growing efficiency,” Churchill raved in a radio broadcast—but said nothing when, soon after, the Hand of Steel met a blaze of bullets.
Yet on Crete, a man trap prowled by subs and crawling with enemy troops and informants, British undercover ops hadn’t lost a single man since John Pendlebury was killed during the invasion. You can’t chalk it up to their training, woeful as it was, or their raw ability; with their taste for sword-sticks and poetry, with their tendency to describe German harbor mines as “about the size of a jeroboam of champagne,” the Cretan crew seemed more at home with cocktails than combat. At best they had, as Antony Beevor put it, “a rather dashing and eccentric amateurism, what might be expected from a mixture of romantics and archeologists.”
But once on the Sliver, they didn’t just learn; they learned fast. Georges Hébert knew the reason, though maybe not the modern term: it’s likely they were aided by biophilia, or “rewilding the psyche.” We’re all familiar with the way the human body evolved, the way our backs straightened and our limbs lengthened as our ancestors left the trees and adapted to life on the ground as long-range hunter-gatherers. But natural selection didn’t just affect the way we look; it also shaped the way we think. We’re living proof that our ancestors—those puny, furless, fangless wimps—developed a superb ability to read the trees, air, and ground. They lived or died by the element of surprise, which meant they had to detect danger before danger detected them, and track their prey by interpreting the faintest scents, scuffs, and rustles.
That’s why we’re still attracted to what eco-psychologists call the “soft fascinations” of the natural world—moonlight, autumnal forests, whispering meadows—and aren’t too surprised when we hear that certain prime ministers and ex-presidents feel the compulsion to paint, over and over, mountain ranges and grazing horses. Winston Churchill began painting during World War I and relied on it the rest of his life to keep the “black dog” of depression at bay, while George W. Bush picked up the brushes immediately after his two-war presidency and has been turning out a stream of landscapes and kitten and puppy portraits ever since.
Because nature is so soothing, right? So relaxing? No—because it’s Red Bull for the brain.
Or so University of Michigan researchers found when they ran a series of tests in 2008 pitting, essentially, Your Brain In The Woods vs. Your Brain On Asphalt. Student volunteers were given a series of numbers and asked to recite them in reverse order. Then they were split up and sent on a roughly one-hour walk: half of the volunteers strolled Huron Street, in downtown Ann Arbor, while the other half meandered the Arboretum. When they got back to the lab, they were tested again. This time, Arboretum crew didn’t just outscore the street walkers; they outscored themselves. “Performance on backwards digit-span significantly improved when participants walked in nature, but not when they walked downtown,” the researchers found. “In addition, these results were not driven by changes in mood, nor were they affected by different weather conditions.”
But maybe it was a matter of noise? Maybe the city walkers were temporarily frazzled from all that traffic clatter. So the researchers came up with a new experiment, and that’s when things got really interesting. Volunteers were given the same test, but instead of going for a walk afterward, they were shown pictures of either urban or woodland scenes. Then they were retested. Once again, City lost to Nature—and not just to nature but fake nature. So if you think sunsets and seacoasts are just pretty views, the researchers concluded, you’re making a big mistake. “Simple and brief interactions with nature can produce marked increases in
cognitive control,” they explain in a paper for Psychological Science called “The Cognitive Benefits of Interacting with Nature.” Treating that oceanfront hotel room “as merely an amenity,” they add, “fails to recognize the vital importance of nature in effective cognitive functioning.”
That’s all it takes, just a reminder of our ancestral past can be enough to flip a switch in the brain that focuses attention and shuts out distractions. You slip back into hunter-gatherer mode—and when you do, you’re capable of remarkable things. You can close your eyes and track by nose like a bloodhound, and even ride a mountain bike down a trail blindfolded and never miss a turn or hit a tree. Journalist Michael Finkel learned about human echolocation—the ability to “see” by sound, like bats—when he met Daniel Kish, a blind adventurer. Kish had his eyeballs removed when he was one year old because of a degenerative disease, but he grew up to become a skilled cyclist and solo backcountry hiker by relying on the echoes from sound waves he creates by clicking his tongue.
“He is so accomplished at echolocation that he’s able to pedal his mountain bike through streets heavy with traffic and on precipitous dirt trails,” Finkel reports. “He climbs trees. He camps out, by himself, deep in the wilderness. He’s lived for weeks at a time in a tiny cabin a two-mile hike from the nearest road. He travels around the globe. He’s a skilled cook, an avid swimmer, a fluid dance partner.”
Kish says his hearing isn’t special, just his listening. As proof, he holds up a pot lid. When Finkel closes his eyes and clucks, he’s surprised to find he can instantly detect the difference when Kish moves the lid closer and farther from his face. You’ve actually got more raw ability to echolocate than a bat: our mouths aren’t as suited for squeaking, but we’ve got a big advantage when it comes to interpreting echoes. “Just the auditory cortex of a human brain is many times larger than the entire brain of a bat,” Finkel points out. “This means that humans can likely process more complex auditory information than bats.”
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