Heroic Interview: Natural Born Heroes with Christopher McDougall

You're listening to Natural Born Heroes, an optimal living interview with Christopher McDougall and Brian Johnson. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimized podcast. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Christopher McDougall, who's a writer who has written at least a couple great books that I know of. Born to Run and natural born heroes 10. Today we're going to talk about Natural Born Heroes. It's one of my favorite recent books, and it's just awesome. The subtitle is Mastering the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance. And Chris is a great storyteller and he integrates a couple of different. Several different themes, but two primary themes. One, a story of resistance fighters in Crete during World War II who pull off this extraordinary heist kidnapping of a general. And he tells that story in such an extraordinary way and the natural movement, movement and kind of weaving those together to, as the subtitle suggests, teach us the lost secrets of strength and endurance. So I love the book. I'm thrilled to be connected and really excited to explore some of my favorite big ideas. Chris, thanks for taking the time.

Oh, no, I'm happy to have this conversation. Sorry about the rumble of the milk truck that just went by. We're out in Amish farm country, so exactly this time of night, the milk truck goes by. Okay, it just went past. We're good.

Well, actually, I like that. This is always good to be in the environment. And the fact that you live in Amish, Pennsylvania, in itself is just so cool from a natural movement. Get back to nature perspective.

We got here by accident. We didn't really intend to move to this location. It was just kind of an accident search. But the dividends have been amazing. The food here is amazing, and everybody produces something. So just now I need some cream. I know which neighbor has a Jersey cow, which is wet right now. So I get my cre There, my peaches somewhere else. I can take my pig enemy slaughtered somewhere else. So it really is like this time machine back to the 18th century.

That is so cool. And we're doing this interview via video. Chris is currently shirtless. He just had a workout or something. Looking great. So all that natural movement and natural food is working for you? I love it. I wish we had a great.

I think it's my ADHD working for me. You know, I had three essays I had to finish today. I'm starting this new series for the New York Times, and they had to be done today, but it's nice out today. There's just no way in hell I'm sitting at a desk all day, so it's like five minutes of work and then bust out the door and do something else.

That's so cool. I just chatted with Katie Bowman, who's biomechanist. I always say biomechanist, but biomechanist who writes about natural movement, moving your DNA, etc. So we just had a similar chat. Just inspiring to get out there and integrate all these ideas into our day to day life. So Natural Born Heroes. I always love to start at the top. Natural Born Heroes. When you were creating that title, what were you thinking?

I'm really bad with titles. I really wrestle with them a lot and I'm never quite satisfied with what I come up with. Born in a Run, for instance, I really resisted it. I'm like, yeah, it's not really that good a title. It's kind of obvious, you know, who's going to buy a book called Born to Run. And my editor basically kind of talked me off that ledge, so I listened to him. And this time around, this just seemed so perfect. It just fits. And the idea is that we have this notion that heroes are the other people, you know, not me. It's somebody else. And you hear that all the time to the point where it's insane. Like you ask Sully, you know, he lands a boat on a river and not only does nobody die, no one even gets wet. And the first thing he says is, well, you know, I don't consider myself a hero. Well, dude, then who is? So what I wanted to get at was this notion of we have sort of distanced ourselves from the notion of what a hero is. And the point I want to make is that the ancient Greeks believed that every human has the potential to be a hero. It's all there, it's all naturally hardwired in your system. You just gotta unlock the door and let it out.

Which brings us right to the question I wanted to ask first, which is the ancient Greeks. And you talk a lot about mythology as you weave the myth of the Cretan resistance fighters and a number of other natural born heroes. Throughout the book, tell us about the ancient root of the word hero.

Yeah, the Greeks fascinated me while I was researching this, because you're much better read than I am. But basically Greek mythology was something you did in high school and then there was like a 45 year gap where I never looked at it again. And then when I started to dig back into it, my eyes were really open to aspects I never considered before. And first and foremost, Was, you know, I sort of thought of the ancient Greeks as being the more sort of fanciful and like sci fi version of humanity. And actually they were like cold hard pragmatists. The myths were not there to make you believe in supernatural creatures are going to swoop down and save you. The whole idea of the myths was to give you hard practical knowledge, things you can use and also to show that everybody's flawed, everybody's weak, even the gods. And if you're not on your game, dude, you're going down. So be prepared. So that was one of the first things that really got me excited about researching ancient Greek mythology was man, there's some, there's some extractable skills here. And then the next thing was the big reveal was just look at the word hero, what hero means. And in my mind again I'm thinking of some like roided out dude, like the rock kicking down a door with submachine guns under each arm. But what the ancient Greeks believed was the word hero just means protector. Someone who has the ability to not only take care of themselves, but somebody else. And superficially that's a very simple term, but when you start to like dig down, it's actually pretty profound. You know, protector means a lot of different things. You know, it's mind, body and soul. You got to have the physical ability to help somebody else. You got to have the know how, the knowledge and most of all you got to have the desire, you know, the compassion. And then when you, when you realize that, that a hero is dependent like a three legged stool upon all three of those aspects, then you start to realize, man, this ancient Greek mythology, it's at the foundation of everything we ever talk about. Every sort of holy trinity, every mind, body and soul, ego, id, superego, it all gets back to that same idea. You gotta want to do it, you gotta know how to do it and you gotta physically be able to do it. And that's what hero is all about.

Wow, that is incredibly inspiring. And so again, hero literally means protector. And the point you make throughout the book, as you just highlighted is that it's the core strength of a hero is compassion and love and this service to something bigger than themselves. Which leads us to the next idea which you alluded to. But I want to just shine a spotlight on that idea of being fit to be useful. This isn't an egoic. Hey, check me out I'm ripped concept. Talk to us about the natural movement and that idea of an ethos of being fit to be useful. So we can use that compassion and actually have the strength to actually show up and do something useful, right?

Yeah, it's fantastic, you know, and you can actually even distill it down to two words. I mean, think about this as a two word life philosophy. If you want to put a bracelet on your arm and look at it every once in a while for inspiration. What if the bracelet on your arm just said two things? Be useful. Be useful and apply that test to everything you do in your life. Like when you go to the gym and you're doing bicep curls, ask yourself, am I being useful? What will this exercise ever do to help me or anybody else? As opposed to going outside and practicing some parkour, practicing some climbing and jumping and evasion techniques in every other aspect of your life too. Even when you're having an argument with a friend, say, am I being useful or am I just trying to win? Am I advancing the knowledge? Am I advancing the friendship? Or am I just trying to come out of here with a wife with a notch in the wind column? So where this whole philosophy comes from for me comes from Georges Bear, the great French, I'm not sure what you would call him, philosopher, physical scientist, but began as a French naval officer who witnessed the destruction of Martinique in that horrific volcano. And what really shattered him was watching tens of thousands of people perish because they couldn't execute a few basic physical movements. And then when he went back to France, he tested a bunch of naval cadets and found that they couldn't do it either. They couldn't do a simple jump, they couldn't climb. They couldn't lift another cadet on their soldier on their shoulder and carry them. And so he created a method of exercise called the Natural method. The idea being that there are 10 basic human movements, animal movements that every person should be able to execute. And those things are really useful. And he coined that phrase, be fit to be useful. But again, I love just boiling it down to the two words be useful. And again, you apply it to everything. Strength, skill, compassion. Do those two words apply?

So good. And I got the old school Hebert kind of overview. I'm excited to dive into that as well. So many different ways we can go. Let's go to Crete and let's go to these resistance fighters who kind of become our heroes that we use to kind of unpack those lost secrets of strength and endurance. First, do you want to just give us a frame? I'd love to hear you describe that. Just give us the quick context of what we're talking about when we Think of these cretin resistance fighters. Then we'll drill into the weeds and the fat and the movement and all that good stuff.

Sure. You know what was fascinating to me was I was reading up on some transcripts of the Nuremberg trials, and they had Hitler's chief of the military, right before he was sentenced to death. They said, do you have any last words? And he says, yeah, I do, I do. If it wasn't for the Greek people, somebody else would be sitting here right now. If it wasn't for the Gretan resistance, you'd be the ones in this chair and not me. And I thought it was just startling that he didn't blame Hitler for messing them up. He didn't blame Stalin. He didn't blame Eisenhower and D day. He blamed the one place in the world that put up the biggest fight, that had no army. When the Germans attacked Crete, the Greek island of Crete, the standing army was gone. The Cretan militia had been moved to the mainland to try to stop the Germans there. That attack had been thwarted. The Germans just, basically just stepped over the Greeks on the mainland. So when they got to Crete, the only ones there were this sort of ragtag band of allied cast off fighters and Cretan civilians. And they held up the Germans twice as long as it took the Germans to get through the entire country of France. They held them up for 10 days. Hitler had given his army one day and the Cretans held them up for 10 days. And that 10 day delay was just long enough to slow down operation Barbarossa, which was going to be Hitler's big advance into Russia. Because Barbarossa got off late, they ended up getting stopped by the snows which held up the German army. And next thing you know, it's calamity. It's Napoleon all over again. So when I heard about the Cretan resistance, I thought, well, man, who were these guys? What were they up to? And I just started to unpack one story after the other, and two things happened. My first thought was, holy crazy. These guys are like superhuman. They are physical mutants. These are like guys like Wolverine. Then my next thought was, no, they can't be. They're just like you and me. Genetically, they're not different. So physically, they must be doing something else. What exactly are they doing? And Brian, for me, one of the tests I like to apply to any thing that I think I'm discovering is, does this thing have a pedigree? Does it have a track record? Because everybody can show up in a brand new diet and a Brand new exercise and a brand new supplement that they just discovered. But if it is discovered, to me it's got no relevance. But if this thing has been around for two or three thousand years and we keep seeing it turn up again and again and constantly effective, then there's usually something there that I want to look into.

Staggering. In the same way that Chris has captured that very briefly, imagine a page turning book all about that and actually getting in. Because not only did they resist, push back, and delay the actual kind of occupation by 10 days, they then harassed them incessantly for X years. Right. And, and pulled off the kidnapping, which you walk us through, and how they actually did that. First time ever, right. In history that that's been achieved.

Yeah. So what I wanted to look at was first of all, what the heck is happening on this crazy little island full of these indomitable guerrilla fighters? And while I was looking into it, I discovered that they pulled off this insane exploit that had never been done before. For the first time in modern military history, fighters went behind enemy lines, kidnapped the commanding German general and got him off the island. And they were on the run for more than a month. And again, when you first hear about this, you think, God, what a stupid idea. Like, what a stupid plan. There's a reason why you don't try to kidnap the other general because he's the most protected guy on the island. And secondly, you're on an island, there's nowhere to go. So these guys snuck behind the lines, they got the general, and then they went on this like mad dash and being pursued by 100,000 German soldiers. So circling this island with search planes and attack dogs and grid marching troops, all trying to wrestle these guys together and they couldn't catch up with them. So that's what I wanted to know. Dude, how do you pull this off? And secondly, what exactly were they doing that the rest of us can learn?

Okay, so let's pull that thread. So what were they doing? What can we learn?

Okay, so my first question was, you know, when you come from a background of any kind of ultra endurance sports, almost always your first question is, what did those guys eat? You know, what were they putting down their necks? Because really every contest begins and ends with nutrition. My friend Sunny Blendy is a nutritionist and she says that an ultramarathon is an eating and drinking contest with some exercise and scenery thrown in, because if you can't get calories down your neck, you're toast. So that was my first thought, was, what the hell are these guys Eating, because again, you're on the run. There's no aid stations, there's no one's handing you, like, cliff shots. So I started looking at their diets, and what I came up with was the Cretan diet has essentially become known as the Mediterranean diet. And what is the Mediterranean diet? It's the one we keep coming back to again and again. It's high in saturated fats, it's high in wild greens. It is almost barren of any kind of processed foods. Really super low in processed carbohydrates, Almost non existent, even in their bread. You got to soak their bread in wine just to get your teeth into it. Their bread's like biting into a sponge. It's just tough, dense stuff. Lots of greens, lots of meats, lots of olive oil, lots of fruits. So basically, their diet is essentially. You can call it what you want, but it's hard to escape the Paleo diet. It is what it is. This is the diet that's been around for tens of thousands of years. The second thing I was looking at with them is basically, how do you physically go? Like, what were they doing that allowed them to transfer that caloric energy into effective movement? And then what you come up with is a system of movement very similar to what George of Air discovered and what people who do parkour use today.

Again, amazing. And so much we can talk about there. I want to. I want to shine a light on two aspects of the diet that I love. The way you unpack in the book weeds and fat. So talk to us about weeds. And specifically, if you can shed some light on the power of omega 6 vis a vis 3 the ratio. And I love the metaphor you use of the fire. Nice, toasty little fire is nice, but setting the whole place on fire isn't so good. Can you tell us about that?

What's cool about our jobs, Brian, is that you have a mystery, something you're curious about, and you start to look around and I'm sure this is your experience, and. And you can't believe the people you find. So I became interested in what the Cretan resistance fighters were eating. And I was able to actually find exact foods, you know, exactly the kind of foods they were eating. Kind of lamb, the kind of Greek orta, which is a collection of weeds. I could read on the printed page what these things were, but I wanted someone to actually put them in my mouth. And so I started looking around and I found a former ballerina in Brooklyn named Leda Meredith, who is the granddaughter of Greek immigrants And she was used to going out in Prospect park in Brooklyn and foraging for wild greens, the same kind of foods that these resistance fighters were eating on Crete. Lada is finding in, like, the least calorically dense place in the planet, which is like a park in New York City. So Leda was able to walk me through it. She even came out of my house, walked out the door, and was instantly spotting, you know, these are mustard greens. You know, these are dandelions, these are pokeweed berries. Just finding food left and right. These are black walnuts. And finding this whole, like, nutritionally dense cornucopia literally steps from my back door, which basically steered me toward was, you know, basically kind of a rule of thumb is the deeper the color, the denser the phytonutrients. And, you know, you take an iceberg lettuce, it's essentially. It's basically a glass of water, the glass of water that's been turned solid. But you take like, mustard greens or dandelion greens, the color is so dense and rich. That's a good indication that that is bursting with slow burn phytonutrients, which do two things. They will fuel you on a more sustained level and then also create fewer residues that your body then has a process and expel. So it's kind of like putting something in your fireplace. You want to get maximum heat for the most amount of time and the least amount of residual smoke. And that's what these forage greens are giving you.

That's awesome. Can you talk to us about the Omega 6, Omega 3 imbalance that we now have as a result of moving away from this more classic ancient diet?

Yeah, I wish I had my numbers in front of me because I'm not a number guy, and so my proportions are off. But essentially that was what was happening, was that as we move from processed foods, we were tipping the balance from slow burn to fast burn, that what we were doing was taking what had been a diet that was heavily stocked on slow mastication foods, slow digestion foods, and then slow caloric release foods, and switching them to things which would basically torch in your system, like newspaper or currency.

Yeah, that's awesome. And then just to highlight the. The thing that I found most compelling in what you were describing in terms of the Omega 6, Omega 3. You made the point that. And Michael Pollan talks about this too, that we've moved from eating leaves, weeds in the parlance we've been discussing, to seeds. Some crazy percentage. And I'm not a numbers guy either, but some crazy Percentage of calories now come from four seeds, right? Rice, soy, corn and wheat. Right. Just nuts. And the omega 6 composition in those seeds is very different than the omega 3 in the weeds. And the ratio has gotten so warped that the Omega 6s, although important for fighting inflammation now, rather than have that small fire, we're basically torching ourselves. And I just love the way that you presented that and sorry about torturing you in the attempt to get that particular story out.

That would be. I'm glad you zeroed in on it. That's exactly right. That's one of the things that Leiden was talking about too, was when we were out foraging, it was one of her points was she's like, you notice there's no grains. I'm not picking up any grains. I'm not picking up any seats. Everything is green, everything's bursting. And it's year round. You always find something. There's almost always something. There's purslane bursting out, there's dandelions bursting out. And even below the frost line, you can find greens high in omega 3s.

Yeah, it was so cool. And you were talking about they're literally growing out of the cracks, you know, and these guys are running racing. And this other point that you make in the book is they're running up these ridiculously steep, you know, jagged mountains in Crete is just gnarly as an island, right? Going up and down and pulling out the. And making the horta as they, as they go through. And then the other part of it that you talk about, and you bring maffetone into it and just really cool storyline in itself of the fat that they were burning as a preferred source of fuel. Can you talk to us about that?

You know, again, it's funny, if you go back and read the Iliad, the Odyssey, you'll always find references to a sacrifice of fat. You know that. And Homer even does it too. There's one point where Odysseus shows up and he's being feted by a king and Homer puts in a sly little aside of like, they took the fattiest portion and they gave it to the poets, you know, the greatest member, basically, he meant for him. So this idea of a big, like dripping handful of like cheap fat, that was what you really wanted. And yet we're told, oh, you want to cut that off? Don't eat the fat, get fat free. But anybody who's become fat adapted, who's recalibrated their metabolism, so they're now basically running with saturated fat as opposed to processed Grains. The first thing you notice is I'm not hungry that much. I'm not hungry that much. I'm not slumping that much. When I bumped into Tim Noakes in D.C. again, Tim's, he's over 70 now, built like a lumberjack. I tried to take him to lunch and he's like, no, it's okay, I ate yesterday. Yeah, so did I, dude. And I also ate this morning, I'm going to eat this afternoon. He eats once every 36 hours. He packs in a belly full of sausage, eggs and bacon and then he'll just rock on that super fit, super active guy. So, you know, the story's been told. What I liked is applying it to a life or death circumstance. Because it's one thing if you are making an informed choice about, well, you know, I got a weak belly, I want to trim down a little bit. That's pretty comfortable circumstances to make a dietary choice. It's another thing if you're being chased by 100,000 seriously pissed off German soldiers. Like what you put in your mouth is going to decide whether you get away or not. And so that's why I thought putting that fat adapted diet to the test. You can't find a better example than the Greek resistance.

Yeah, it's super cool. And then you bring Tim Noakes, you bring Maffetone, you bring Mark Allen and just all these other, you know, natural born heroes who have, who have changed from the carb loading, etc. And Tim Noakes is the former carb loading king, right?

Yeah. That's the thing about Brian. You know, I was talking before about pedigree. Like, you know you're onto something when you see it show up again and again and again. So you look at the fat adapted diet. Well, Homer was talking about it with the Greek heroes, the ancient Greek athletes themselves. In the early Olympia, they were on a fat adapted diet. The Mediterranean diet is a fat adapted diet. Then you find about Mark Allen, the guy who was the indomitable monster of Ironman triathlons back in the 1990s, set a record that couldn't be touched for 12 years. He made his breakthrough when Phil Maffetone made him fat adapted. So the idea was that back in the 80s and 90s, endurance nutrition was still kind of a dark science. People didn't really know what was going on. And the guys who busted through were the ones who were fat adapted. That's when I started realizing there's something here. You just keep connecting the dots through thousands of years and the same way of Eating turns up again and again.

So then can you tell us how you switched and how you became fat adapted? Kind of the high level overview of that.

Yeah. You know, it's funny when I think when you're a doubter, when you are skeptical, that's when you have lasting memories. So I wasn't really buying this whole fat adaption song and dance. I was gonna go through the motions. I was gonna check it out. I had the same experience with barefoot running, you know, when I first heard about barefoot running. Maybe, I don't know. You know, the only barefoot runner I knew was barefoot Ted, who was like the last guy I was gonna pay any attention to. But again, it was one of those conversion experiences when you come in doubtful and you have something shoved in your face. Actually worse. Man, you become a convert for life. Same with fat adaptation. I vowed to myself that I was going to be true to Maffetone's two week test. I didn't believe it was going to work, but I was going to follow the rules and do it right. And just to see whether this might unlock some revelations about the creatine resistance. So to become a fat adapter, you're doing two things. You're adjusting the fuel that's going in and how you're using that fuel, what you're putting down your throat, and then how you're actually burning it and employing it. So Maffatone, what I love about Phil Maffatone is He's like this old 70s hippie. He's not interested in having an argument with anybody. He doesn't have a screaming match with people about what diet is best. So he doesn't even use the word diet. He goes, just do a two week test. You don't have to believe me, just try what I say for two weeks. At the end of two weeks, that's how you feel. If you feel better, then continue. If you don't, go back to eating Haagen Dazs all you want. The two week test from offetone has two key components. Number one, you get rid of all the high glycemic foods, all the rice and the pastas and the fruits and the beer, anything which will jack up your insulin levels. So only slow burn fuels low calcium food. Eat all the avocados you want, all the cashews, steak, hamburger, bacon, eggs, go nuts. Eat all that stuff you want. Just no bread, no pastas, no ketchup, things like that. The second thing you have to do, and this is one thing that a lot of people neglect, is you also have to change the way you exercise. You want to keep your heart rate out of the distress zone because that's really the one purpose the high glycemic food serve is that when it's do or die, man, when it's fight or flight, you want all hands on death, just chucking all the coal into the furnace as fast as you can. You want every nerve in your body to be on super react. And that's when your body wants to fast burn foods. But what motors athlete, you can train yourself so that you only rely on slow burn foods even as you're getting faster and faster. You know, every once in a while you'll go into distress mode and you'll have enough glycemic energy there when you need it. But most of the time, as you're training, keep your heart rate down just below your anaerobic threshold so that your body is never looking for those fast burn foods. So that's basically what it was. You know, he got a very simple formula for how you calculate your threshold. And so what I did every day was I ate a breakfast of bacon, eggs and sausage. No toast, no jelly. And then when I would go for a run, I would go at a pace that was embarrassingly slow. But what happened was over time, you get better and better at moving at a low heart rate. So the 10 minute mile becomes a 9 minute mile, an 8 minute mile while your heart rate still remains low.

All of which is so awesome. And this was the thing we talked about before that I was excited to talk to you about kind of personally. So in and out, we got to get rid of the fast burning carbs. And you mentioned a handful of them, the breads, the pastas, the ketchup, which is more sugar than anything. Right. And then load up on the juices. Yeah. All of that fast burning fuel and then transition to the more fat based. That part, as you said, I kind of, I get, I've been doing that for a while and it's crazy, the benefits. And then exciting to do it even more focused, which has been even more beneficial. And then the second part is the harder part, which is training under the anaerobic threshold. And if I remember right, it was something like 180 minus your age. And he joked of, don't ask me why, that's just what works, right? Yeah.

Which I love. That's what I love about my platonic. You know, he could have gussied that up with a bunch of hocus pocus. He's like, yeah, I don't know. It just seems to work, you know, it's super funny. He seems very honest about what he knows and doesn't know.

Super funny. So. And he's got the data, as you said, both historically, you know, looking back and then with Mark Allen. I mean, my gosh. Right. But then, so then my question, okay, so then, you know, for me, minus 42, that's 138. Right. Like you said, you're going at an embarrassingly slow pace at that point. So I'm excited and I'm just getting into this because I just recently read your book, but to continue to cultivate that. But then my question for you was, and you said you had an interesting answer for which I'm very eager to hear. What's your ratio or what, if any, anaerobic training do you do these days vis a vis the aerobic?

So here's what happened. This summer I'm working on a new project. I am looking at animal human partnerships. I'm really intrigued by, by the fact that for most of human ancestral history, we always partner with animals. We have animals around us all the time. And it's only very recent, hundred years or so that we stop riding horses. We stop riding in horse drawn carriages. We don't milk cows, we don't have hunting dogs. We got all the animals out of our lives. And again, it's a very abrupt shift. Thousands of years, one way of life and now suddenly in the blink of an eye, a very different way of life. Way of life. And you can sort of see the way we're kind of groping our way back. You know, we have therapy animals and using equine therapy for Parkinson's and PTSD and anxiety, they're bringing dogs into cancer wards. We can sense that something is missing from our lives that used to be filled by animals, but we're not quite sure what it is anymore. And so that sort of intrigued me. And so I spent this past summer training for an ultramarathon in Colorado that you run with your donkey. It's a 29 mile race that you run next to your donkey.

Oh yeah, I've done that a couple times. I'm kidding. No, dude, that's so good. Most ridiculous thing I could think of saying. But I'm sure there are a lot of people who have. That's awesome.

You know the thing about though, Brian, is once you get into these worlds, like that world is so normal to people in that world that you sort of assume that everybody does it. You know, once you're in the boro Racing world, all you talk to are burrow racers. So, yeah, so I spent my summer training with my wife and a friend of ours with our three donkeys going on progressively longer runs. And here's the interesting thing about it. The donkeys kind of set the pace. Because if you're going to have an argument with a donkey about how fast to go, you're going to lose the donkey setting the pace. And what I found is donkeys are excellent at optimal cruise control. It's a 95 degree day, they can lock in on exactly the pace, which is perfect for a 15 mile run. And they know exactly when to stop in the shade and chill out. They know exactly when to stop and walk. And so for a lot of these runs, you're like resisting. Because I want to do like 12 consecutive miles before I stop for a break. Donkey's having none of that. The three miles, you stopping for a break, you try to persuade them it's not happening. What I found is by the end of the summer, I felt better than I have in years. The training was slower, it was more interrupted, it was more frustrating. But it was only frustrating because I had my preconceived notions of what I wanted to do. And the donkey was tapping into 10,000 years of inherited knowledge. And I had this like, you know, got to run the 359 marathon, you know, got to do the 259 splits kind of thing. And think, what I learned is that, man, just sometimes, just by taking a breath, slowing down, you end up feeling springier and stronger and more resilient.

That's so cool. I just. As you share that story, I imagine even going on a hike with my dog, you know, he'll do his thing and blitz up and then he's just chilling under the tree, right? Rushing to get to the tree to relax. Just be mellow and then relax. Yeah, it'd be total mellow.

But mellow is not a word that many of us. If you use the word mellow, attach it to workouts, you're immediately discredited. But it's, it's the way to go.

This is exciting. Okay, so to unpack that a little bit more. So I love the idea of, you know, moving and then relaxing with the donkey pace. I mean, that's just amazing to kind of still wrap my brain around. And then in terms of the anaerobic threshold, are you saying that at this stage you don't even go beyond that, or is that in terms of a ratio of. When you're in that context, it Sounds like you don't ever. But in general, when you're training in your life, are you doing any or moving in your life, are you doing any anaerobic stuff stuff these days?

Yeah, Yeah. I started training with Eric Orton, the coach who trained me for the Copper Canyon race I wrote about in Born to Run. Anaerobic training is really useful for a couple of things. For one, just for sharpening up form, it's hard to run bad when you're running fast, especially when you're doing interval repeats. So about once every two weeks, Arrow could beat the crap out of me with some short, high intensity speed work. But most of the intensity work we did was on hills where it actually wasn't necessarily that fast. And it was a gradual build up to the anaerobic threshold. So I got to say the anaerobic work was pretty limited. It was mostly targeting sharpening of form as opposed to increasing of heart rate. And the other thing I do a lot of is natural movement and parkour. I train with a group up here in Lancaster. And the goal of parkour is kind of similar to the goal of Maffetone's fat adaptation training. The better you get at parkour, the lower your heart rate remains. So the first couple times you do a jump, your heart's pounding out of your chest, but as you get better at it, you relax. And so you can do a two hour workout and your heart is, you know, basically right around sleepwalk stage.

That's amazing. So then to make it even more personalized, I'm looking to kind of get to that fat burning state and I'm out hiking or which is kind of my primary thing. I run a little bit, but more like hiking and up hills. Just go at the embarrassing pace and just continue being at that 180 -42. That's your threshold and just let that kind of expand and is the rule of thumb there?

Yeah. The thing about Brian is again, where this notion of speed came from, this idea of like, go, go, go, fast, fast, fast, it is a modern monstrosity that really never applied to any natural challenge at all. Again, think about these Cretan resistance fighters. You got the pissed off German general that you're running through the mountains with. You sprint, you're dead. It's a game of endurance, not a game of speed. And so these guys were going at only the minimum all the time. So, yeah, I recommend that.

Right on.

The other thing too is, you know, I heard guys say this one time trail running. They said, you know, I never got hurt from going too far, only from going too fast.

That's awesome. Well, this is good. Thank you for that. That tip. And just another I'm going to just drill into very personal thing. Personal burpees. I love doing burpees. Right. So burpees are obviously a great way to jack up your heart rate very quickly. Would you do that? If I was going to train that from a fat burning perspective, would I just mellow out and just keep it below the anaerobic and have fun seeing what I can do to expand that?

Yeah. Here's where I'm going to say it's time for me to hand off the baton to the experts. Because the guys who really know are guys like Kelly Starrett and. And fill Maffetone. I'm basically a guy that tells people what they think. So I feel like a little outside my pay grade here. There's another thing too. A lot of what I recommend is stuff that I personally like. So anything that I can actually count, like burpees, I don't like to do it.

Well, I watched you do. No, this is good. I watched you do that one workout on. I don't look at anything online, but for whatever reason, when I was reading up on you and found your Outside magazine video stuff, that awesome dude that does all the stuff in the barn, you guys were working out. Right.

Steve Maxwell, he'd be a great guy for you to talk to. Steve Maxwell is the mental archives of every lost fitness secret. He's amazing.

So good.

See, he created what he calls the Maxtor cyst. What I like about it is it's eight different movements strung together and you only got to do it like two or three times and you're done. If I can do one thing 15 times, by the time I get to 12, my tension is wandering. Yeah, one thing three times. Yeah.

So I'm going to let us go after this. But do you keep that in aerobic or is that something that you get a little bit anaerobic on?

I'll keep that anaerobic. Absolutely.

That's so cool. Okay, cool.

Is very slow based, skill based. And the idea is total slow execution.

Perfect. Okay, cool. Thank you all listeners for bearing with me there. Hopefully you found some insight in that for yourselves as well. The other thing I want to underscore when you talk about I've been saying his name wrong, but maffetone. Is that closer to the right way to say it?

Yeah, that's right.

That it's not about a diet, it's about a test. I love the Way you described how he gave you that piece of paper. This is a test. Just run the test. Can you talk to us about that a little bit?

Yeah, I think you underlined it like three times. Not diet test, dude. You know, Phil's idea is that the best laboratory is your own responses. And that if you subject yourself, I guess one of the mysteries. You hear this all the time. People say, listen to your body. Listen to your body. It's like, well, I'm listening. I don't know what the hell my body's saying. Yes, my body's telling me that I'm sleepy. Well, why am I sleepy? Is it because I'm stressed? Is it because I'm fatigued? Is it because I just ate a giant bowl of hummus with Doritos? You know, what exactly is causing this drowsiness? And so Maffetone's genius was saying, well, listen, if we can remove a couple of the variables from the experiment, we can actually zero in what may be causing certain reactions. And so that's why he calls it the two week test. He said, let's just remove all the alien foods which have only been introduced recently into human culture, See how your body reacts without those foods, and then gradually reintroduce them. And then you can not only see how your body's reacting, but you can then also test levels. So what I found personally is like, I can eat one piece of bread. No physical response whatsoever. I eat two pieces of bread, I immediately get that insulin. Jack. I feel, like, bloated. I can actually feel my stomach bloating. I can feel my eyes drooping. It's bizarre how that second piece of bread actually acts. Creates a chemical reaction in my body.

So cool. Experiment of one, run the test. I love it. And then, final idea. I want to hear you explore. You talk about Hercules and how Hercules wasn't actually the strongest guy in the fight. We think of him as you said before, kind of that roided out rock like superhero figure, right? And I love the fact that you said the. No, no, it was his. If anything, he had a little man's complex, right? And it was his unbending. His unbending will, which when we think about a natural born hero, we all have the ability to cultivate our will. Can you talk to us about that vis a vis Hercules, etc.

Yes. I think it was Pindar that had a great description of Hercules. And, you know, I was like, wait, who's he talking about again? I thought, you know, I thought this dude was kicking down doors and he referred to Hercules as being not necessarily the biggest guy, not the strongest, not the most muscular, but the most capable. Hercules was the most capable. Then when you take that perspective and you look at what the 12 labors and all the mini labors are all about, usually Hercules use other possible means other than muscular force to try and figure something out. His first reactions were always, can I talk my way out of this mess? Can I strategize my way out of this mess? Can I sneak out of this mess? It was always to come up with a strategic response first. Muscular force only as a last resort. And that muscular force was always applied in a very skillful way. You know, it was always like sort of choking out a lion, you know, or pulling a wrestling move or using the force of water to, you know, clean out a stable for it. So what think about Hercules was so cool about that was to me, it really perfectly crystallizes what we mean by a hero. A guy that has strength, skill and compassion and that has an entire quiver full of options. Every time he goes in, he's not going in there to try and overwhelm you with force. He's going to try and out talk you. He's going to try and out think you. He's going to try and outmaneuver you.

That's amazing. And ultimately he's going to be useful, right? He's going to do this all for something bigger than himself and, and move through those challenges in a meaningful way. Chris, I really appreciate all the work that you've done and do and kind of your own little experiments of one and Born to Run. And then this book, Natural Born Heroes. Tell us, what's your next book? Do you have a name for it yet?

We have kind of a working title, Top Secret. I'm not sure if it's going to stick, though, but the column starting for the Times is called Running with Sherman. And it's about this attempt to take a mark for death rescue Donkey and see whether he can be rehabilitated and turned into an ultramarathon running partner. And that's what I've been working the past year was learning as much as I can about partnering with animals, training animals, and then also what, you know, they can teach me about my own endurance and training and athleticism.

Amazing. What's the scheduled date on that? Do you have one?

Yeah, I'm trying to finish the third essay for the Times. I'm trying to finish that now. So I think that series is going to roll out really soon and then I'll be doing a book on the subject as well, which will probably be out sometime in 2017.

Right on. Okay. Well, people can follow that, obviously on New York Times. Your best website is@chrismcdougall.com that's it.

Yeah.

You're awesome. Thank you for all you do.

Hey, Brian, appreciate it, man. This is a great talk. Thanks a lot.

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