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

5/5 rating. 

Book #125 of 2019. Read October 29, 2019.

I absolutely loved this book! I read “Born to Run” also by Chris earlier this year and loved it so much I figured I’d pick this up when I saw it. It did not disappoint!

This book is a winding path through a few different interconnected stories. The unbelievable kidnapping of a Nazi General on Crete during WWII, the lineage of heroes from Crete dating back to Odysseus, and warrior diets and parkour.

These seemingly disparate topics are melded together to tell of Chris’s search to get to the bottom of not only the kidnapping, but the true Cretan heroes who pulled it off. As Chris comes to find out: “Heroes care. True heroism, as the ancients understood, isn’t about strength, or boldness, or even courage. It’s about compassion.” This book gave me some ideas that I hope to implement into my hiking routine. Hopefully these can take my hikes to the next level. I want to get to the top of any peak with some gas left to spare!

Quotes:

“Empathy, the Greeks believed, was a source of strength, not softness; the more you recognized yourself in others and connected with their distress, the more endurance, wisdom, cunning, and determination you could tap into.”

“Philip II, Warlord of Macedon:

If I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city.

Spartans to Philip II: If“

“From then on and for the rest of his life, Paddy’s motto was Solvitur ambulando: ‘When in doubt, walk.’”

“‘In other words, tradition has more to do with the “weakness” of women than has nature.’”

“Be fit to be useful.”

“Teach your boys to walk, to run, to jump, to box, and to swim, and leave those artificial extension movements, which mean nothing, alone!”

“So now all of a sudden the American College of Sports Medicine, with major funding by its first platinum sponsor – Gatorade – was declaring, ‘Thirst may be an unreliable index of fluids needed during exercise’? Something else was fishy: the fifty-six-mile Comrades race never had a problem with dehydration and heat illness before it set up regular aid stations. ‘The paradox did not escape me,’ Noakes points out. ‘How could “dehydration and heat illness” have become a significant problem in marathon and ultramarathon running after frequent drinking had become the accepted norm?’”

“Not one. Ever. ‘There is not a single report in the medical literature of dehydration being a proven, direct cause of death in a marathon runner,’ Noakes discovered.

But if you look at runners who had plenty to drink, that’s a different story.”

“Noakes found twelve confirmed deaths by water poisoning in sports events and thousands of close calls. ‘The “Science of Hydration” is propaganda conceived by marketers who wished to turn a collection of kitchen chemicals into a multi-billion dollar industry,’ Noakes declared. ‘To their credit, they succeeded. To their unending shame, they cost the lives of some of those they were pretending to protect.’”

“‘Ten companies produce 80 percent of processed foods in the world, and they’re creating billions and billions of dollars in profits by poisoning people,’ he says. ‘I’d tax them out of existence. If you don’t take addictive foods out of the environment, you’ll never cure the addiction.’”

IG Link.