Natural Born Heroes

CHAPTER 32

I would argue that many of the ways in which we get sick today have a corporate, almost capitalist origin. We’ve also got this bizarre notion that finally came true, that our bodies don’t really matter.

—DR. DANIEL LIEBERMAN,

Harvard biologist and author of The Story of the Human Body

IN 1983, Stu Mittleman was suffering from a vicious knot on his foot that baffled every specialist he’d seen.

Until then, he’d been having a spectacular year. “I was now entering a new phase of my career that placed me among the top endurance athletes in the world,” he’d recall. In the span of just a few months, he’d smashed his own American one-hundred-mile record, finished second in the Ultraman World Championships (a double Ironman), and averaged nearly a hundred miles a day to set a new national mark for the six-day run. Stu’s ultradistance heroics and lady-killer’s grin made him such a media sweetheart that Gatorade named him its first national spokesman and Ted Koppel featured him on Nightline every evening during the six-day race.

Stu was surfing a wave he couldn’t have even dreamed of a few years earlier. For extreme endurance studs, the eighties were a weird and wonderful time. Megadistance events were suddenly back in fashion after a century in hibernation, and TV was eating it up. Multiday races used to be all the rage back in the 1870s, not least because they added a dash of drama and cruelty to the typical test of speed: when you lined up at the start, you had no idea how far you’d have to run. You were the one who decided when you’d reached the finish, and how much rest—if any—you got in between. Superstars like Edward Payson Weston captivated the crowds by dreaming up new ways to challenge the clock and one another. In 1876, seventy thousand fans turned out to watch Weston go head-to-head in a six-day challenge against Daniel O’Leary, an Irish door-to-door book salesman who beat the champ and set a world’s best of 520 miles. But it wasn’t easy to keep selling tickets to see two guys repeat the same motion over and over again for a week, and eventually long-distance loping was pushed aside by more action-packed, bleacher-friendly games like football—until, in 1982, an exhausted college student named Julie Moss fell to her knees and changed everything.

Julie was on the verge of winning her first Ironman when she collapsed a few yards shy of the tape. Another woman passed her, but Julie kept crawling. Instantly an anthem was born: “Just Finishing Is Winning.” Julie the Unbreakable arrived right when America needed her most; she showed she had the sand to stick it out when most of us were wondering, privately, how many of us did. The seventies had left a raw nerve in the national psyche: had we betrayed Plymouth Rock and Valley Forge and turned into a nation of quitters? The evidence was pretty depressing. In quick succession, we’d watched Richard Nixon cheat his way to an easy win, then cut and run rather than face the music. “I would have preferred to carry through to the finish, whatever the personal agony it would have involved. My family unanimously urged me to do so,” Nixon said, right before skedaddling. We scrambled onto a rooftop helicopter to get out of Vietnam while the Vietcong stuck it out in the jungle, then cringed as Jimmy Carter wobbled in the face of the Ayatollah’s stony resolve during the Iran hostage crisis and fainted less than halfway into a six-mile fun run. “If you get in it,” press secretary Jody Powell had warned the president before the race, “then you’d darn well better finish.” Well …

No wonder “go da distance,” as Rocky Balboa put it, became the message of the seventies. You didn’t have to win, the Italian Stallion declared; you just had to not wimp out. That was 1976, and it was as if a Bat-Signal had flashed across the sky. Within a few years, all kinds of strange, Not Wimping Out events had popped up, like Alaska’s 1,112-mile Iditarod, California’s 100-mile Western States trail race, and Hawaii’s Ironman triathlon—dreamed up, not coincidentally, by Navy officers just three years out of Vietnam. At first these contests were treated as Battles of the Freaks, until Julie Moss—twenty-four years old, still in college, and One of Us—jolted our eyes from the winners in the front of the pack toward the heroes in the back. TV was soon zooming in to cover these gritty Everymen, as well as a new creation by Fred Lebow, the master showman who started the New York City Marathon: on July 4, 1983, Lebow revived the Six-Day Race and soon made a star out of a Queens college instructor named Stu Mittleman.

A few years earlier, Stu was in Boulder, Colorado, for New Year’s when he decided to see if he could run to the top of Flagstaff Mountain. It was only about a two-mile climb, but he was so psyched when he reached the peak that he turned around and ran right back down to the center of town and into Frank Shorter’s running store.

“How do I get into this year’s Boston Marathon?” he asked.

You don’t, he was told. The race was in less than four months, and he’d first have to qualify by running another marathon in under three hours. Fine—two weeks later, Stu averaged a smokin’ 6:20 a mile to finish San Diego’s Mission Bay Marathon in 2:46. Raw speed he obviously had, but as he began to experiment with longer distances, he discovered his true talent was staying power. Soon he was cranking out more than a half-marathon a day, seven days a week, and leaving the standard Ironman behind to take on twice the distance: nearly five miles in the water, 224 by bike, and 52 and change on foot.

But damn. That right foot! Just when he was reaching his peak, a sore spot behind Stu’s little toe kept swelling until it was big as a Ping-Pong ball and made his entire leg throb like an abscessed tooth. Stu was supposed to be boarding a flight for France in a few weeks for another six-day race, this time as the only American invited to a showdown of international all-stars, but after shuffling from one specialist to another, his foot wasn’t any better. Stu’s last tune-up before the event was a triathlon in Long Island. He postponed the inevitable as long as he could and even showed up at registration, but he finally had to limp up to the race director and break the news that he was bowing out.

Please, the race director pleaded, first do me a favor. Long Island triathlons don’t get many TV sensations in their lineups, least of all model-handsome men of steel fresh off the Today show and a week-long spot on Nightline. Before you make up your mind, the race director urged, see Dr. Phil Maffetone.

Stu sighed. I have already seen nearly a dozen medical doctors, chiropractors, and body workers and have basically given up hope that my injury can be healed, he thought. Still, he decided to humor the guy and hear what Dr. Phil had to say. That way, at least, he could drop out with a clear conscience while satisfying his own curiosity. For some time, he’d been hearing stories that were too good to be true about this healer of last resort who not only fixed the unfixable but coaxed astonishing performances out of slumping runners and triathletes. “Phil has a reputation for getting broken-down, over-trained, world-class athletes back up and running,” Stu would recall.

Luckily, Dr. Phil Maffetone was right at hand. He’d come to watch one of his reconstruction projects compete, and he agreed to take a look at Stu right there on the lawn outside the VFW hall. As they chatted, Stu discovered Phil wasn’t even an M.D.; he was a chiropractor with such severe attention-deficiency that he’d barely squeaked through high school and still couldn’t stand to read books. Granted, Phil was a former track athlete, but otherwise there was no outward reason he should know anything other doctors didn’t. Maybe Stu’s friends were only impressed because Phil treated them like real patients and not high-functioning psychotics. Phil didn’t lecture them that “all that pounding is bad for the body” or answer with a shrug and “What do you expect?” when they described how their heels ached after a two-hour run. Phil wasn’t shocked by big miles and didn’t smirk at the adventurers who tackled them; as far as he was concerned, a properly fueled and maintained body could click along forever. He took their pain—and their potential—seriously.

Phil had Stu lie down on the grass. He began pushing Stu’s arms and legs to assess muscle resistance. “Relax,” he said. He grasped Stu’s foot and gave it a yank. Angels sang.

“Suddenly,” Stu says, “the lump disappears!” He can’t believe it. He jogs around gingerly, and for the first time in months he can run without pain. He’s so thrilled, he gets stupid; instead of playing it safe and seeing if the miracle lasts until lunch, Stu decides to jump right into the triathlon. He storms along to a top-twenty finish and his foot feels fantastic.

“This is just first aid,” Phil warns him. He’d found a dislodged bone in Stu’s foot and managed to snap it into place, but worse breakdowns lay ahead unless Stu made some serious changes.

Stu was all ears. Sure. What’s my problem—running technique? Weak arches?

Sugar.

Sug—really?

And not only sweets and sodas, Phil explained. Pasta, power bars, pancakes, pizza, orange juice, rice, bread, cereal, granola, oatmeal—all the processed carbohydrates that Stu had been told were the ideal runner’s diet. They’re just sugar in disguise, Phil believed. Humans are superb endurance athletes who’ve roamed farther across this planet than any other species, and we didn’t do it on Gatorade and bagels. We did it by relying on a much richer and cleaner burning fuel: our own body fat.

“The point of your training isn’t to see how fast you can get your feet to move,” Phil said. “The point is to get your body to change the way it gets energy. You want it to burn more fat and less sugar.” And as it stood now, Stu’s body was “a sugar-burning, fat-storing monstrosity.”

Stu was baffled. Okay. But how does food hurt your foot?

Think of your body as a furnace, Phil explained. Fill it with slow-burning logs and it will run smooth and strong for hours. But fill it with paper and gas-soaked rags and it will burn hot, rattle the pipes, and die out until it’s fed again. That’s what you did, Phil said. You shook yourself into an injury by stuffing your furnace with garbage. If you want to stay healthy and perform your best, you need to teach your body to use fat as fuel. Immediately.

Stu saw three major difficulties. The first problem with Phil’s plan, of course, was Phil. The man was—and there’s no way to sugarcoat it—a stone-cold hippie. He had long hair and a dangly ponytail and used words that made Stu’s stomach heave: “holistic” and “hormones” and “walk before you run.” Literally: walk. Phil wanted Stu to start his next race by walking. Good Lord. The second problem with Phil’s plan was Stu: he had a major international championship in three weeks, and Rule #1 for all sports is Don’t Experiment Before Game Day. Phil wasn’t even proposing an overhaul; he wanted Stu to completely reverse his diet, training, and race strategy and do it all in less than twenty days.

But the biggest problem was Everyone Else in the World. Everyone Else in the World thought the “Maffetone Method” was nuts. Carbs were warrior food; everybody knew that. Stu was an academic by training, and right from the beginning he’d made himself a student of his sport. “I cut back my work hours, lived like an ascetic monk, trained like a maniac, ate only what Runner’s World told me I should, and did a carbohydrate depletion followed by a carbo load in the last few days before the event,” Stu would recall. So now what? Runner’s World was dead wrong? All those pre-race pasta dinners were poison? Carbohydrates were hurting, not helping?

The Maffetone Method even defied the greatest voice of all: Dr. Tim Noakes, author of Lore of Running and one of the world’s most respected sports scientists. Dr. Noakes was both a medical doctor and the head of Exercise and Sports Science research at the University of Cape Town, and so trusted an authority that he served as expedition doctor for Lewis Pugh’s North Pole swim and spearheaded reforms that dramatically reduced South African rugby injuries. Moreover, Noakes was his own space monkey; by age sixty-four he’d run South Africa’s fifty-six-mile Comrades ultramarathon seven times and had another seventy marathons under his belt. With more than four hundred scientific papers and two thousand competitive miles to his name, Noakes knew more about runners, living and dead, than the runners themselves. He’d not only written the eight-hundred-page Lore, but he kept rewriting it; every few years, Noakes updated his bible with fresh science. The best in the world listened to Dr. Tim Noakes, and Dr. Tim Noakes was all about carbs.

“Athletes whose training involves prolonged high-intensity daily exercise must eat high-carbohydrates diets,” Noakes made it clear. “Performance during prolonged exercise can potentially be enhanced by increasing the amount of carbohydrate stored before exercise,” he went on, “and by maintaining a high rate of carbohydrate utilization, particularly when fatigued, via ingestion of carbohydrates in the appropriate amounts.” It was all right there in chapter 3. And all those fifty-plus pages on “Energy Systems and Running Performance” could be nicely summed up in just seven words: Stuff in carbs and keep on stuffing.

And sorry—who was Phil Maffetone again? A ponytailed back-cracker from suburban New York. Those were Stu’s two options: the man who wrote The Book versus the man who probably hadn’t read it. Ordinarily it would be an easy decision, but pain relief is the ultimate persuader. Stu decided to give the Maffetone Method a chance.

Okay, he told Phil. How do we start?

Simple, Phil began. To use fat as fuel, you need to do only two things: cut out sugar and lower your heart rate. “We store only a very limited amount of carbohydrate in our bodies,” Phil explained. “Compare this with a relatively unlimited supply of fat.” Carbs are a puddle; fat is the Pacific. At any time, your body has some 160,000 calories on tap: about 2,000 from sugar, 25,000 from protein, and nearly 140,000—87 percent—are fat. “Even an athlete with only 6 percent body fat will have enough fat to fuel exercise lasting for many hours,” Phil explained. “When you use more fat, you generate more energy and your carbohydrate supply lasts longer. When you teach your body to rely on fat, your combustion of carbs goes down, and so does your craving for them.”

But there’s no pussyfooting around. Your body loves fat; it’s a treasure your system would rather hoard than burn, so if it senses there’s any other fuel at hand, it will use that first and convert the leftovers into more fat. To free himself from the sugar-burn cycle, Stu would have to go cold turkey: he could stuff himself silly all day, but only on meat, fish, eggs, avocados, vegetables, and nuts. No beans, no fruit, no grains. No soy, no wine, no beer. Whole dairy like sour cream and real cheese were in; low-fat milk was out.

That was Part 1. Part 2 was even more basic: Slow down. When you sprint, Phil explained, you jack up your heart rate. Your body interprets a hammering heart as EMERGENCY! so it goes looking for those gas-soaked rags. It wants the fastest-burning fuel it can find, and that means sugar. But once you’ve conditioned your body to rely on fat, you’ll be able to run as fast as ever—and much faster. For Stu to keep his heart rate in his fat-burning zone, Phil had an easy formula: just subtract your age from 180. Stu was thirty-two years old, so Phil gave him a heart-rate monitor and set it for 153 beats per minute (148 plus five bonus beats because Stu was a highly conditioned athlete). Anytime the monitor beeped, it meant Stu had to slow to a walk until his pulse eased back down.

For three weeks, Stu was a perfect disciple. Come the six-day race in France, however, he’d had enough. It was humiliating enough when all the other runners shot off around the track while he trailed them at a walk (“Yech!” Stu grimaced), but to watch them snacking on cookies and candy at the aid stations while he had nothing but almonds … well, that just bordered on human-rights abuse. Unfortunately, Phil Maffetone had come to France with him, so Stu had to sneak cookies off the aid station table and hide them at the far end of the track, where he could munch later when Phil wasn’t looking.

But before digging into his stash, Stu noticed something. For once, he could actually see what was going on. Usually during a race he was huffing along with his chin on his chest, but this time he was head high and breathing easy. Come to think of it, he’d felt that way during every run for the past three weeks. For most runners, enjoying the view is a rare sensation; as soon as fatigue kicks in, your eyes drop to the pavement and your vision tunnels. You’re no longer in the present; you’re locked on to how far you’ve come and how far you’ve got to go. Stu always assumed pain was the price of gain, but since he’d been on the Maffetone Method, his runs had actually been a pleasure.

“Each energy-producing state has specific and real sensory-based references,” he’d learned. “Your body knows this by the way the world ‘looks,’ ‘sounds,’ and ‘feels.’ When you move in a comfortable fat-burning state, the visual information is distinct, expansive, and three dimensional with a peripheral vastness and expansiveness that is unique and identifiable. It’s as though you are in a 3-D surround vision movie theatre.”

You’re seeing with the eyes of a hunter. But when your heart rate climbs, you become the hunted. “As soon as you shift into a more challenging sugar-burning state, visual information tends to collapse inward, the peripheral fringes tend to disappear and your attention gets drawn into a much narrower field of vision. Visual images tend to flatten out, become two-dimensional, and you begin to feel as though you are running through a tunnel with the world painted on the inside walls.”

So that’s how hunter-gatherers run antelopes to death. They don’t act like the animal they’re trying to kill; instead they’re silent and graceful, moving easily with their eyesight sharp, their breathing controlled, their bottomless body-fat energy on tap. Much the way Stu was moving now, in fact, as he smoothly and stealthily pursued the runners who’d dropped him at the start. Three weeks earlier, Stu had been so hobbled by injury he couldn’t compete; now, he was chasing down the best ultradistance runners in the world and getting faster by the day. Stu felt so good that for the entire six days, he never dug into his cookie stash. He set a new American record of 571 miles, crushing the old one by more than a half-marathon and finishing in second behind only the Beast himself, 24-Hour World Record holder Jean-Gilles Boussiquet of France.

That did it; Stu was now a fat-as-fuel true believer. For the next ten years he whirlwinded through the record books with such strength and style, it looked more like art than effort. In a display of “virtually flawless footracing,” as one journalist put it, Stu defeated the reigning world champion in a thousand-mile showdown and not only shattered the old mark by sixteen hours, but even ran his second five hundred miles faster than his first. He handled the back half of his life the same way; instead of slowing down in his forties, he got stronger, running more than fifty miles a day as he set a new speed record from Los Angeles to New York City. “No other American ultrarunner, male or female, has exhibited national class excellence at such a wide range of racing distances,” his American Ultrarunning Hall of Fame induction proclaimed.

But the funny thing is, Stu wasn’t even Phil’s best student. Compared with Mark Allen, Stu was … well, there’s really no comparing anyone to Mark Allen. When Mark came to Phil in the late eighties, he was in his twenties but already feeling old. Triathlons were beating him up and not paying off; Mark was always hurt in training and blowing up in races, either fading toward the finish or dropping out altogether. Like Stu, his broken body gave him an open mind. “I was warned that his methods were probably going to sound crazy,” Mark would recall. Not to mention embarrassing: Phil made Mark pedal far behind the pack during group rides and plod along at half speed during runs. Mark’s training partners were convinced he was washed up … until four months later, when Mark went flying past. “I had become an aerobic machine!”

“I was now able to burn fat for fuel efficiently enough to hold a pace that a year before was red-lining my effort,” Mark explained. “I was no longer feeling like I was ready for an injury the next run I went on, and I was feeling fresh after my workouts instead of being totally wasted.” Mark soon tore off an insane streak: for two years, he didn’t lose a race anywhere, at any distance. He won Ironman six times, including a stunning comeback victory at age thirty-seven, but what’s more intriguing is what happened after he retired. Bikes got lighter, wetsuits got sleeker, training and nutrition became more lab-tested and sophisticated—yet no one could touch Mark’s times. It was nearly two decades before another Ironman could match him.

“Mark Allen was well ahead of us scientists,” agrees Dr. Asker Jeukendrup, a human metabolism expert at England’s University of Birmingham and an accomplished Ironman himself. Jeukendrup is among the top ranks of endurance specialists, yet even he’s a little foggy about the role played by the quiet guy with the ponytail. So was Mike Pigg, who only tracked Phil down at Mark Allen’s urging. “Phil Maffetone is not crazy,” Pigg insists, which suggests he wasn’t always sure himself. “I feel very fortunate to have met him when I did.” After switching to the Maffetone Method, Pigg won four USA Triathlon National Championships and remained resilient enough to compete for nearly a quarter-century. Dr. George Sheehan—the cardiologist, best-selling author, and “philosopher king of the marathon”—also put his legs in Dr. Phil’s hands.

But oddly, Phil eventually began seeing more rock stars than Ironmen. An athlete has to be supremely confident or borderline desperate to gamble on a system that flips everything she’s been told and guarantees she’s heading straight to the back of the pack, possibly for an entire season. But rock stars don’t have to deal with doubtful coaches and corporate sponsors; they just have to be strong enough to endure months of onstage musical marathons. “Musicians are all searching for the same two things,” Maffetone learned. “How do I get more energy and how can I become more creative?”

James Taylor was an early Maffetone adopter (“I feel great!” he’d rave), and the Red Hot Chili Peppers brought Phil on board as tour doctor (years later, at age fifty, Peppers bassist Flea could still crank out a sub-four-hour marathon in a driving rainstorm). Rick Rubin, the great bearded sage of the sound studio, tracked down Phil in 2003 when Johnny Cash was on his deathbed. Phil got Johnny back on his feet, helped restore his eyesight, and began weaning him off his astonishingly high pill count of some forty different medications. Cash was so grateful, he gave Phil one of his guitars. But ultimately, Cash couldn’t recover from the loss of his wife and the aftereffects of the chemical barrage. Phil had his hand on Cash’s shoulder one afternoon when Cash turned and looked him in the eye.

“It’s time,” Cash said.

No one saw Dr. Phil at Ironman after that. No one saw much of him anywhere, unless you were Rick Rubin. Rubin owned Shangri-La, the secluded Malibu bungalow where Bob Dylan and the Band used to camp out and jam with Eric Clapton and Van Morrison (and where, for a time, TV horse Mr. Ed was stabled). Every once in a while, Phil would roll up at Shangri-La and play Rubin some songs he’d written. Then he’d climb back into his car and disappear into the Arizona desert. Phil was so out of touch, it was some time before he learned that after thirty years, he’d won both an argument and a convert:

Dr. Tim Noakes, the “High Priest of Carbo-Loading,” was making a confession.