Natural Born Heroes

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 off 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.”

For years, Kish has been teaching other blind students how to move in real-life ways. He sent two of them off to mountain-bike with Finkel in California’s Santa Ana Mountains. “To determine where the trail is going, and where the bushes and rocks and fence posts and trees are, the boys rely on echolocation,” Finkel notes. The riders slap their tongues against the bottom of their mouths, listen for the echoes, and form a mental image of the trail ahead—all at full speed. One “flies down the dirt trail in aerodynamic form, hands off the brakes, clicking as fast and as loud as he can,” an awestruck Finkel finds. “I try and warn them when the trail presents a serious consequence, like a long drop-off on one side or a cactus jutting out. But mostly I’m just along for the ride. It’s difficult to believe, even though it’s happening right in front of me. It’s incredible.” The only crash, in fact, is Finkel’s fault, when he hits the brakes in front of one of the blind riders and turns himself into an instant tree.

Your nose, which can detect more than a trillion distinct odors, has as much untapped ancestral power as your ears. A research team at the University of California, Berkeley, was curious to see whether humans can mimic bloodhounds and track by scent. So they blindfolded thirty-two student volunteers and had them put on earmuffs, thick gloves, and kneepads to eliminate any sensory input except smell. Then they laid out a thirty-foot trail of chocolate essence in a grassy field and turned them loose. “Two-thirds of the subjects successfully followed the scent, zigzagging back and forth across the path like a dog tracking a pheasant,” the researchers reported in Nature Neuroscience. With zero training, most of them did well; with a little practice, they were great. Their tracking speed more than doubled after a few days, and that was just the tip of their potential. “Longer-term training would lead to further increases in tracking velocity,” the researchers noted.

Yale University neuroscientist Dr. Gordon Shepherd had the money quote when he learned of the experiment: “If we go back on our four legs and get down on the ground, we may be able to do things we had no idea we could do.” Seeing in the dark, tracking prey by nose—today they sound like superpowers, but for two million years, they were just survival. We haven’t lost the natural strengths that made us the most formidable creatures on the planet. We might just need the Natural Method to wake them up.

On Itacaré’s beach that morning, Erwan Le Corre hoists a rock about the size of a watermelon and passes it to Serginho, who pivots and hands it to me. I swing it into the hands of the guy beside me as Erwan hands Serginho another rock, then another, until there are five in play and it’s all I can do to get one rock out of my hands before the next is shoved into my gut. Unlike medicine balls, which always have the same, easily graspable shape, the unpredictable size and weight of rocks forces you to focus intensely on grip and balance. Even though the rocks are slickening with sweat and my arms are burning, I’m desperate not to be the first to let one slip. Luckily, just when I’m in danger of smashing my toes, Erwan raises a hand for us to stop. I drop my rock, relieved—until I find out what’s up next.

He pairs us off for Erwan-style wind sprints: Each of us has to hoist another guy across our shoulders in a rescue hold and race in and out of the knee-high surf. If there’s a more nerve-racking workout than preventing a 220-pound Thai fighter from falling on your head while you’re sprinting through churning water, I don’t want to know about it. Humans are heavy and lumpy and oddly balanced, forcing you to constantly adjust your posture, footing, handholds, and core. Keeping control of a body on your back, as I soon learn, demands intense concentration.

Next Erwan has a pile of six-foot-long driftwood poles at the ready. The other guys know what to expect and start trotting down the beach. As they pass Erwan, he tosses some of them a pole. He tosses the last one to me, then takes off on a run with his hands outstretched. I toss it back, and he immediately flips it toward me again, this time a little ahead so I have to accelerate. We cross the entire beach this way, mixing up our throws, totally absorbed in our run-’n’-gun until I notice we’re about to crash into the rocks. Without breaking stride, Erwan flips the stick around, plants it in the sand, and pole-vaults up onto the boulders.

By the time I climb up after him, he’s twenty yards away, scuttling to the top of a giant rock overhanging the sand. “The secret to a good jump,” he says, “is a good second jump. Remember your springs—” And with that, he’s sailing through the air. He lands ten feet below with a deep knee bend, but instead of rolling or dropping to his knees, he bounces right up with a hop and tears off at a sprint. “You never see an animal stick a jump by flopping all over the ground,” he calls up as he loops back around. “Cats are running the second they land. If you do it the same way, you’ll decrease impact and be ready to flow into your next move.”

All that empty air below makes Zuqueto pause. “Caralho! Esse gajo e forte,” Zuqueto mutters. Damn! That guy is strong. Then he surrenders to trust and sails off over the rocks.

For Erwan, finding Itacaré was lucky, but no accident. He’d grown up in Étréchy, an old-worldish city in northern France that’s only twenty-five miles from Paris but still surrounded by tumbling rivers and old-growth forest. Erwan’s father worked in a bank during the week and loved to plunge into the woods on the weekends, taking his son on long, rambling hikes. “He would climb a boulder that was too hard for me,” Erwan recalls. “I’d ask him for help. He’d just shake his head and go like this”—Erwan lets his face go stony and crooks a beckoning finger.

Any soccer coach would have drooled over this tall, fearless, cat-quick kid, but those woodsy weekend boot camps with his silent father squelched any interest Erwan might have had in team sports. Instead he went the solitary route: first martial arts, earning his karate black belt by the time he was eighteen, then Olympic-style weight lifting, then triathlons. Oddly, the better he did, the worse he felt; he worried constantly that he wasn’t training hard enough and became enraged whenever he lost in competition. Erwan was still a teenager, but already his fun was making him miserable.

He needed a way out, and the werewolf of Paris just might have it. For some time, Erwan had been hearing rumors about a mysterious inner-city savage who roamed the rooftops at night and called himself Hors Humain—“Beyond Human.” Erwan asked around and eventually was led to Don Jean Habrey, the Fagin of a secret gang of young men who turned the city into their own wilderness park. Don Jean was pushing forty at the time, but Erwan couldn’t tell by his fight-ready physique and mane of thick black hair held back by a sensei’s headband. Soon Erwan was part of the tribe, learning a kind of urban guerrilla training that Don Jean called Combat Vital.

“It was like a ‘Fight Club’ of natural movement,” Erwan explained. “We would train most of the time at night so as not to be seen, climbing bridges, balancing on the top of scaffoldings, kicking walls to toughen our bare feet, moving on all fours, dropping off bridges into the Seine in the freezing cold of winter.” Combat Vital was equal parts hardcore conditioning and high-wire performance art, both without a net. Don Jean’s gang would hang by their legs from a pedestrian overpass and do upside-down crunches over speeding traffic, and climb to the top of apartment buildings to leap barefoot from roof to roof.

“There is no ‘try’ for this kind of practice,” Erwan says. “If you miss, you die.”

But Don Jean seemed unkillable. Over time, he graduated from secret midnight stunts into full-on spectacles, leaping from a helicopter in nothing but a bathing suit to swim around an iceberg off Greenland and, at age sixty, serenading the Loch Ness Monster with a one-man kettledrum sonata before free-diving into the freezing lake to look for it. For seven years, Erwan roamed Paris and dodged police by night with Don Jean and the Combat Vital crew. He spent his summers working the beaches of Corsica, selling toys and junk jewelry and stick-on tattoos to sunbathing tourists, eventually figuring out a way to become his own middleman; he designed his own plastic refrigerator magnets and found a factory in Shanghai to manufacture them. Soon he was earning enough in royalties to live on the rest of the year.

As Don Jean drifted toward showmanship, his student got serious about scholarship. Erwan’s eyes first opened to Combat Vital’s roots when he was prowling the secondhand-book stalls along the Seine and happened across an old copy of Georges Hébert’s L’Éducation Physique. He’d vaguely heard of it—there was talk among the Combat Vital disciples that Don Jean, and even the Yamakasi creators of Parkour, had gotten some of their ideas from Hébert. Erwan dug in and was electrified.

“Be useful”—genius! It wasn’t just a motto, Erwan realized; it was a law of nature, a first principle that explains how human history formed the human body. Suddenly it made sense: we’re weird-looking for a reason. Strip us naked and humans look more like insects than animals, what with our spindly legs and gangly arms and fat, round heads swiveling on top of peculiarly inflexible spines. We’re slow and weak and can barely climb to save our lives, and we lack all the really good stuff like tails and hooves and fangs. We’d be helpless if we couldn’t do three things: hunt, gather, and share.

Period. That’s it. Those three occupations have been the human career path since the dawn of time, and we’re still at it today. Shakespearean sonnets, Google, the Super Bowl, NASA—strip all human achievement down to basics and they’re essentially the same thing: we look for stuff, we hit it with a rock, we share the goodies and the info with the clan. We’re far from the baddest cats in the jungle, but we don’t have to be; for those three jobs, our bodies are the perfect tool. We can stand tall and pivot, allowing us to throw with deadly accuracy. We’ve got multi-jointed arms and awesome thumbs, ideal for gripping and toting. We’ve got language and literature because our necks are long, our lips are nimble, and our thoracic control is off the charts, all of it combining to allow the power of speech. We’re Mother Nature’s problem child, the species that can’t sit still, because our upright posture and rubbery legs give us fantastic running range. We are what we do, and what we do is move—up mountains, across rivers, through the snakiest rock-face wormholes. We can’t even stay put on our own planet.

Hébert didn’t invent this stuff, Erwan knew. Well before witnessing the Martinique volcano, Hébert had been intrigued by the ocean-going gymnastics of the gabiers, deckhands who wrestled sailcloth and scaled masts and wet rigging in wind and surging seas. Those guys must have been really impressive and great athletes, Erwan thought. Hébert also spent time in French colonies and found his ideal athletes in Montagnard mountain tribesmen in Vietnam and African hunter-gatherers. “Their bodies were splendid, flexible, nimble, skillful, enduring, resistant and yet they had no other tutor in Gymnastics but their lives in Nature,” Hébert observed.

Hébert wasn’t an inventor; he was an observer. That’s what made him so fiery about things like female strength, because he knew the truth was right under the nose of anyone willing to open their eyes and minds. “Young black African woman, where the magnificent development of the torso stands comparison with Venus,” Hébert argued. “What a marvelous ideal for the French mother!” Renoir’s paintings of bathing beauties drove Hébert nuts—why pretend women are nothing more than animated cream puffs? Men and women don’t have the same bodies, but they have the same motor skills. “The natural doctrine applies as much to girls’ education as it does to boys’,” Hébert insisted.

Wait, put gender aside for a sec. What about age? If Hébert was right, Erwan thought, he wasn’t just promoting good health—he was freezing time. How did Hébert put it? Their bodies were resistant. Exactly. There’s no margin for error in the wilderness, so our survival depended on long-lasting suppleness and sinew. When that volcano blows, when the clan needs your help, when the moment comes to move, you can’t be icing your sore knee on the sofa or excusing yourself as too old, young, or girly. Méthode Naturelle could make you not only powerful, Erwan realized, but also age resistant. You’d get strong and stay strong, deep into old age.

Erwan was on fire. He went on a research pilgrimage to Reims, site of Georges Hébert’s first training playground, which was destroyed during frontline fighting in World War I. The Marquis Melchior de Polignac, owner of Champagne Pommery, was a big fan of Hébert’s work, so he made sure it was later restored to Hébert’s original specifications. While Erwan was in Reims, he knocked up at Pommery headquarters to see if maybe they had some old Georges Hébert stuff lying around? Journals, possibly. Or photos?

They had something even better: a phone number.

In the suburbs of Paris, Hébert’s son was still alive. Régis Hébert agreed to let this intense young disciple visit … and keep on visiting. Every time Erwan returned to the Hébert house, he was hungrier than before. “I came back with a big list of questions—questions I couldn’t find any answer to in Hébert’s book, about Hébert, his personal lifestyle, how he educated his children.”

Régis said his father had lived what he preached, including the revolutionary step of deploying his wife and other women as Méthode Naturelle instructors. Just before the war began, Georges felt he was close to connecting true health with heroism. “It was the great time of MN,” Erwan says. “Hébert believed that if everyone was practicing MN with its altruistic goal, with its moral education benefits, there would be no wars anymore, no reasons for people to be in conflict with each other.”

Hébert didn’t live to see his dream come true, but Erwan could. Someone had to remind the world what Méthode Naturelle had to offer. Erwan went to get Régis’s blessing—and the old man erupted. How dare Erwan think he could follow in the great man’s footsteps? If Erwan tried, Régis warned him, he’d regret it. Erwan was stung and mystified. What the hell just happened? A few weeks earlier, Régis had been all smiles and encouragement. Now he was sputtering and threatening.

. . .

Erwan couldn’t figure out what went wrong, until he tracked down some other MN old-timers who wised him up. “Hébert’s son is the gravedigger of his father’s work,” they told Erwan. Régis can’t revive Méthode Naturelle himself but is afraid someone else will, they said. So he just clutches his father’s legacy to his chest and monitors anything said or written about it “like some kind of censor.”

So the old man never really wanted to meet me in the first place, Erwan thought. He just wanted to find out what I was up to. Okay, Erwan decided; so that’s how we’ll play. Erwan knew Georges Hébert had sucked up information from all over—not just from native islanders but also from thinkers like Edwin Checkley; Dr. Paul Carton, the pioneering French physician; Francisco Amorós, the Spanish military instructor; and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, the Swiss education innovator. From their ideas, Hébert fashioned his own.

“Did Hébert just replicate the path Amorós had designed?” Erwan asks. “Nope. He followed it but retooled it, improved it, redesigned it.”

So to hell with Régis. Now it was Erwan’s turn.

Serginho and the guys have to scoot, and only then does it hit me that we’ve been working out nonstop for nearly two hours. I’m wiped out, but exhilarated. Erwan suggests we cool off by practicing one more skill—open-water deep dives—but before we reach the surf, we’re approached by a young woman who’d been watching from under a coconut tree.

So, she asks, what’s with all the rock jumping and stick throwing?

Instead of explaining, Erwan grabs a driftwood pole. He plants one end in the sand and rests the other on his shoulder. He bends into a squat. “What’s your name?” he asks.

“Sandra.”

“Sandra, if you can get to the top of this pole, I have a surprise for you.”

Sandra studies his face for hints of a prank. Then she sprints, straight up the pole and over the top of Erwan’s head. She’s on the ground before she realizes she really did it.

“Bravo!” Erwan says, delighted. Then he removes the pole from his shoulder and places it on hers. “Surprise!”

Erwan barely gives her a chance to protest before he’s off, quick-footing up the pole like a tightrope walker. Sandra’s face flashes through four emotional peaks in four seconds: surprise, fear, resolve, and—as Erwan reaches her shoulder and hops off—triumph.

“Did you know you were that strong?” Erwan asks.

Sandra shakes her head.

“Now you do. Don’t get into trouble!”

Sandra smiles and starts to head back to her tree. But Erwan has another question.

“Are you doing … yoga?”

Uh-oh.

“Yes, I’m an instructor and—”

“You teach that?” Erwan says. “Have you ever used yoga for anything useful?”

“It’s very use—”

“No, in real life. In an emergency. Has anyone ever shouted, Quick! Sun-salute for your life! Of course not. But you hear Run for your life! Climb for your life! Don’t worry, I’ll carry you out of here! all the time. Humans made yoga up for recreation, not for survival. No animal would ever do it. Changing postures in the same place with your head down? Forget it! In the wild, that’s death. You need the luxury of a no-danger environment for yoga. Everything is controlled—the soft mat, the temperature, some guru telling you what to do. It’s not instinctive or natural. It’s make-believe.”

Yoga isn’t about emergencies, Sandra argues. It’s about finding balance and a mind-body connection.

“Your body will never be more connected to your mind than when something is at stake,” Erwan retorts. “That’s how you measure the value of a movement: by its consequences. Climb a tree, throw a rock, balance on the edge of a cliff—you lose focus for a fraction of a second, you’re screwed. It takes a very affluent and indulged culture to convince itself that standing around in weird poses is exercise.”

Despite Erwan’s rat-a-tat-tat attack, it’s obvious he wants to win Sandra over, not beat her down. That’s enough to make her step once more into the buzz saw.

You’re forgetting flexibility, she offers. Yoga makes you more limber.

“If your muscles resist a movement, it’s because the movement is unnatural. So why change the muscle? Change the movement!” Erwan drops down in the sand and juts a leg out in a hurdler’s pose. “If your hamstring won’t let you stretch like this,” he says, bending forward with his head over his knee “then move like this.” Swiftly, he jackknifes the leg back so it folds under his butt. He’s able to reach much farther forward, and he’s much better balanced.

“Now, which one is a real mind-body connection?”

“I think he’s really onto something,” says Lee Saxby, a physical therapist and technical director of Wildfitness, a London-based exercise program built around an evolutionary model of human performance. Saxby is convinced that true human health has nothing to do with exercise machines and everything do to with hunter-gatherer movements, and when he stumbled across a remarkable video by Erwan, he found Exhibit A in the flesh.

As declarations of war go, it’s unique: in a magical three and a half minutes called “The Workout the World Forgot,” Erwan makes a devastating case for ancestral fitness—and he does it without saying a single word. It opens with Erwan carrying a log across a tumbling river, then rockets along as he charges across a savage landscape, instantly molding his body under and around everything in his path. He sprints straight at a stone tower … crashing waves … a breathtakingly high ledge … a mixed martial-arts fighter who appears out of nowhere … and Erwan never slows, instead twisting, sprinting, swimming, climbing, fighting, and vaulting past them all. He’s utterly serene and terribly powerful, a human animal in command of his body and everything it meets.

“What impresses me most about that video is his athleticism,” Saxby says. “It drives me crazy that women think being in shape is being skinny and men think it’s being big. But the best athletes don’t look like models or bodybuilders. They’re lean and quick and mobile. That’s what I like about Erwan’s video. It’s a demonstration of real functional fitness, the opposite of the bulking-up stuff they teach you in the gym.”

Erwan, in fact, could be one of the best living examples of what our bodies were originally designed to do. “Versatility was absolutely the key to survival, because early humans had to be ready for anything at any time,” explains E. Paul Zehr, Ph.D., a neuroscience and kinesiology professor at the University of Victoria who examined human biomechanical potential in his book Becoming Batman: The Possibility of a Superhero. “When early Homo sapiens set off in the morning, he never knew what he’d encounter. If your daily life is hunting and being hunted, at a moment’s notice you might have to sprint, jog, throw a spear, scramble up a tree, hunker down and dig. The specialization we enjoy today, be it as a marathoner, tennis player, even a triathlete, is a luxury of modern society. It doesn’t have great survival value for Homo sapiens in the wild.”

But Erwan’s most important throwback could be the way he’s welded purpose and playfulness, function and fun. When he jumps and tumbles and chucks stuff around, he looks just like a kid goofing around in the backyard, which Dr. Zehr believes could be our true ancestral workout. “You never see your dog running nonstop around and around in a circle for an hour,” Zehr points out. “If he did, you’d think there’s something really wrong with him. Instead, he’ll chase something, roll around, sprint, rest, mix things up. Animal play has a purpose, and it’s not hard to surmise that human play should as well.”

“Most people see exercise as punishment for being fat,” adds Saxby. “So instead of being a release for stress, it’s one more mental burden. That’s why I think what this guy Erwan is up to is bang on. If you can reverse the idea that exercise is punishment, that’s a great gift.”

Reverse the idea … maybe by creating giant adult playgrounds? With mud pits and flaming straw bales and wacky electrical shock hazards that look like jellyfish tentacles? In 2010, one of the least likely voices in fitness (a Harvard Business School student) traveled to the least likely place to launch a trend (Allentown, Pennsylvania) and rigged together some big-kid toys on a backwater ski resort. Five years later, “Tough Mudders” and other obstacle-course challenges, like Warrior Dashes and Spartan Races, are sonic-booming. Jogging is even in danger of losing its crown as Most Popular Participation Sport, because this year more people are likely to splash through a freezing pond en route to a wall climb than run a half-marathon. Granted, these mass muck-athons are more about thrills than skills; few Spartan Racers do anything more to prepare for the cargo-net scrambles and water-tower leaps than paint their faces and pay the fee. Still, there’s a good bit about these events that would warm Georges Hébert’s heart. Tough Mudder has no winners or finishing times, focusing instead on camaraderie over competition. And all of them at least champion the idea of functional fitness: by the time you finish, you’ll know lots about what you can’t do. As far as doing it, that’s where the Box comes in.

In the early 2000s, word began to spread among California police officers and local Navy SEALs that the best place to find a real-world workout was the vacant lot behind a FedEx depot in Santa Cruz. There, a former competitive gymnast named Greg Glassman was leading the faithful through sprints, dead lifts, and his holy trinity of functional fitness: squats, pull-ups, and burpees (a push-up that explodes into a hop). Those three maneuvers—getting up off your butt, up off your belly, and up off the ground—are basic for animal survival, yet Glassman found that many people couldn’t handle them. And isn’t that the whole point of exercise, just mastering your body weight? He called his approach CrossFit, and the cops he trained said it felt less like a conventional workout and more like “a foot race that turns into a fight.” CrossFit remains so wedded to pure and simple movement that if Teddy Roosevelt were to rise from the dead, the one place he’d feel at home after ninety-six years would be a CrossFit “Box” (so dubbed because an early training facility was a storage unit in a San Francisco parking lot).

But on Crete, there weren’t any boxes. For Xan and Paddy to survive, they’d have to rely on something even more urgent and ancestral, something that could prepare them for a fugitive’s life in the mountains. Something like what Erwan is getting up to in the branches overhead.

“Ready?” Erwan asks from his perch twenty feet up in a tree.

“Sure you are,” he answers himself before we can speak. “Let’s do it!”

After three days of double-sessions training, it’s time for my combination going-away present/final exam. Erwan has fashioned an obstacle course that will both test my jungle-man skills and give me a model to reconstruct back home in Pennsylvania. In keeping with his gospel of group dynamics, he asked Zuqueto and Fábio, another Brazilian fighter, to join me.

“The test,” Erwan says, “is to finish the course twice in less than twenty minutes.” He drops his hand—GO!—and we’re off, chasing hard on each other’s heels. Erwan’s course has about twelve stations, all of them sequenced into a natural flow through the forest. We’re springing up into trees, contorting through the branches, and shinnying down fifteen-foot poles. He has us hoisting heavy curdurú logs up on an end and flipping them, bottom over top, up a hill. Then we’re crawling around stakes in the ground and snaking on our bellies through an overturned dugout canoe mounted a few inches off the ground. Even a small cabin comes into play: we’re vaulting through one window and out the other.

The most ingenious thing about Erwan’s course, I realize as I finish the first lap, is how universal it is. Sure, it’s a blast to horse around in trees in the middle of the Brazilian rain forest, but there isn’t anything here that can’t be duplicated in a suburban backyard—or even a suburban street, if you’re blessed with Erwan’s total disregard for arched eyebrows. The day before, I’d watched him stroll down Itacaré’s main street and treat it like his personal rec center. He monkey-walked up a staircase on all fours, tightrope-walked along a railing, and vaulted back and forth down the length of a fence. By the time we’d walked five blocks, he’d knocked out a healthy workout and was ready for pizza.

I have three minutes left and only two obstacles to go—a leap from the porch, then a quick climb up a twenty-foot pole braced between the ground and a branch high in a tree. I’m trying not to show it, but through the sweat and grime on my face, I’m beaming. Two days ago, my heart was in my throat before every jump. Now, after just seventy-two hours, I feel unstoppable. All I need to do is push a little harder and I’ll be right on Fábio’s heels.

Naturally, that’s when disaster strikes.

When I stick the landing off the porch, a red-hot knife jabs me in the spine. My back is seizing so badly, I can’t even stand up straight. I should have known I was pushing my luck—fourteen-hour plane trips always leave me tight as a banjo string. So that’s it, I’m done. Until I remember Erwan’s motto.

Smart body, I remind myself. Use your smart body.

I take hold of the long pole that extends on a forty-five-degree angle up into the tree. Gingerly, I hook one foot up, then the other, until I’m hanging upside down from the pole like a pig on a spit. I tighten my grip and wonder what the hell to do next.

“Any ideas?” I ask Erwan.

“Claro,” he responds. “Sure. Lots of them.” It’s an excellent teaching moment, the perfect opportunity to dig into his mental archives and pull out a few of the innovations he’s compiled over the years. I’ve seen them in his notes, pages and pages of stick-figure drawings dating back to Georges Hébert’s original field experiments. Erwan has a lot of wisdom to pass on—but instead he just stands there, arms folded across his chest. He doesn’t give me a clue, or even a smile.

Neither do Zuqueto or Fábio. They’ve become hardcore converts to the essence of Erwan’s philosophy: when that volcano blows, you’ve got to be ready to go on your own. You won’t have any lifting partner to ease the bar off your chest, no volunteer handing you Gatorade at the twenty-mile mark. A group dynamic may be our natural impulse, but in a pinch, count on being a lonely man. The only thing you can always rely on is the ingenuity and raw mobility preprogrammed into your system by two million years of hope and fear.

My hands are slick with sweat and starting to slip off the pole. Just to get a better grip till I can think of something, I slowly start swinging from side to side, building up momentum. At the top of every swing, my body is suspended for a sec in midair. That’s when I move my hands and feet farther up the pole, gliding higher and higher with almost no pain or effort.

“Ahhh, you learned my secret!” Erwan calls from down below as I approach the top of the pole. “The best secret of all—your body always has another trick up its sleeve.”