Christopher McDougall's Blog

One of the most daring, madcap episodes of the Second World War was the kidnapping by Patrick Leigh Fermor, dirty trickster supreme, and his band of British eccentrics and Cretan hard men, of the German general Heinrich Kreipe.

Seventy years later, youngsters in inner-city London and the suburbs of Paris were becoming experts in parkour, using the urban landscape as an obstacle course to be negotiated with joyful freedom and intense physical discipline.

Christopher McDougall connects these two points, and many in between, in a heady confection that encompasses, among other subjects, military history, archaeology, Greek mythology, neat ways to kill a man and ideas on health and fitness that might just change your life. A line from an old M People song kept coming to mind as I read on, the one about searching for the hero inside yourself.

The Kreipe caper involved an insane trek across the murderous Cretan terrain, which by then should already have done for the motley crew of poets and classicists who had been tasked with detaining on the island German soldiers who would otherwise have been marching on Stalingrad. Had they failed, the progress of the war may have been very different, as Winston Churchill would later acknowledge.

Few of the Special Operations Executive men who joined Leigh Fermor in the Mediterranean could be described as hero material, however: they tended to be, like him, romantic misfits, many of whom might not even have got into the regular army. They proceeded by brain-power and imagination, but on the rugged island of Crete they also needed to hack it physically. And McDougall thinks he knows how they did that.

“The art of the hero,” he contends, is the art of natural movement,” and his answer to the question of how the Cretan mob were able to achieve so much boils down to two basic strands: one is the idea that true physical strength comes not from muscle power but from the fascia profunda, the net of fibres that envelopes our bones and muscles and imparts the energy of “elastic recoil” that allowed us to spring across the savannah in pursuit of lunch, as well as chuck the rocks or unleash the slingshot that killed the lunch for us.

Learn to use your fascia profunda, says McDougall, and you’ll find yourself able to do things you never thought possible. The Cretans, skipping across peaks and valleys like mountain goats, do it naturally, and the SOE boys, he says, learned from them.

The other ancient secret which Leigh Fermor and Co unwittingly accessed, according to McDougall, was the idea of using fat, rather than sugar, as fuel. The fatty-meat, low-carb diet which sustained our hunter-gatherer ancestors until agriculture came along and spoiled everything, has resurfaced from time to time (remember the Atkins diet?), and McDougall believes it’s the way to go.

Cut out those grains, all that pasta and anything remotely sugary, and get some flesh inside you, he recommends. Do that while preventing your heart rate exceeding a certain mark (for which there’s a simple formula) and soon you’ll be lean, lithe and fighting fit. The guru of carbo-loading for distance runners, Dr Tim Noakes, he reminds us, eventually recanted – and, McDougall notes, the SOE boys and their local comrades could cross the mountains on little more than a few nuts and a drop of wine.

He constructs a fascinating edifice of ideas around these two notions, and eventually finds a modern-day hero of his own. But the pleasures of the book are as much to do with the fascinating panoply of characters, war heroes all, British, Commonwealth and Cretan, whose exploits contributed so much to Hitler’s downfall.

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, April 2015

It’s reassuring to discover that heroes, both ancient and modern, are not somehow supernaturally endowed after all. Indeed, they may come by their skills quite naturally. In the thoroughly absorbing Natural Born Heroes, which tracks heroism from the times of Zeus and Odysseus to the World War II bravery of a motley crew of fighters, Christopher McDougall makes it clear that incredible acts of strength and endurance are doable. His extensive knowledge of fitness training, nutrition and physiology winds artfully around a tale of superhuman resistance during the Nazi occupation of the Greek island of Crete, Hitler’s designated launching pad for the invasion of Russia.

By the time Crete’s WWII heroes succeed, we know every detail of how they did it, and how, by reviewing the knowledge and skills they possessed, it is possible for their modern counterparts to do the same. Our skills are inborn, McDougall argues, forgotten perhaps, but recoverable. These “natural strengths” can make anyone useful in the most challenging situations. Just ask Norina Bentzel, a Pennsylvania school principal who in 2001 saved her kindergarteners from a machete-armed intruder.

At the heart of McDougall’s story lies a similar David versus Goliath duel. The Goliath in this case was Hitler, who never saw these Davids coming. A band of British special forces—described as the least-likely combatants in all of Europe—managed to kidnap Nazi General Heinrich Kreipe in 1944 under the very nose of his fellow commander. Nazi retaliation against the locals was swift and bloody, yet Cretan resisters risked their lives to aid the kidnappers. How did they—both British commandos and locals—manage to flee the Nazi pursuers and traverse a mountain, with very little food or rest, and challenges at every turn?

McDougall, author of the 2009 bestseller Born to Run and himself a highly trained athlete, solves this mystery with a witty eye for every detail, inspiring his own captive audience along the way.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

We’ll meet in front of Penn Museum and set off for a gorgeous spring evening run. Join us; I know the Fishtown Beerrunners wouldn’t miss it. Details

The biggest, knife-thowingest, wild-fitnessy event of the tour could be in New York on Wednesday April 15. Don’t miss it. Reserve your seat here.

What was so heroic about the kidnapping of the German general?

World War II warfare was about weapons and blood. And here you have these guys, not soldiers but old-fart British academics. The only reason they’re there is that they happen to speak ancient Greek. And they say: “Instead of killing another person, let’s make that person disappear. Let’s do a magic act. Let’s baffle the shit out of Hitler.”

Read more: http://www.mensjournal.com/health-fitness/exercise/the-extreme-athletes-of-the-second-world-war-20150313#ixzz3VLeS1PE6

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By CINDY STAUFFER | Staff Writer

There will be knife throwing. And a standup comic telling jokes. And a woman and man jumping and climbing. And oh yes, people playing ukuleles.

Welcome to the crazy cabaret that will unfold in Lancaster next month, when author Christopher McDougall launches his  new book “Natural Born Heroes” at an April 12 fundraiser that will kick-start a program for local low-income students.

It’s an unlikely but, in a way, perfect marriage.

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from Lancaster news:

There will be knife throwing. And a standup comic telling jokes. And a woman and man jumping and climbing. And oh yes, people playing ukuleles.

Welcome to the crazy cabaret that will unfold in Lancaster next month, when author Christopher McDougall launches his  new book “Natural Born Heroes” at an April 12 fundraiser that will kick-start a program for local low-income students.

More

Chris McDougall taught us how to run. Now, in his new book, Natural Born Heroes, he teaches us how to move!

More

‘What if women discovered they could be just as strong in the city as they were in the wild? What if they knew they could climb, run, jump, and adapt as powerfully as any man?’ From Chapter 20 of Christopher McDougall’s Natural Born Heroes

I’m going to have to step up my game fast before the Heroes tour reaches the UK on May 14. The people selling the book are clearly a lot more fit than the guy who wrote it:

Six Profile Books staffers (and one former colleague!) have been inspired by million-selling Born to Run author Chris McDougall’s new book Natural Born Heroes: The Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance to test their own strength and endurance by signing up for a Spartan Race in London this Spring. More

 

News and events coming soon.