Natural Born Heroes

CHAPTER 34

Then they cut slices from the thighs, wrapped them in layers of fat, and laid raw meat on top … while the young men stood by, five-pronged forks in their hands.

—HOMER, the Iliad

FOR A MAN who’d spent years on the speed dial of athletes and rock stars, Phil Maffetone knows how to make himself scarce. The only online presence for a person by that name when I went looking for him was a bare-bones Web page, a placeholder for some singer-songwriter that provided no contact info or any mention of medical or athletic work. But in an old paperback, long out of print, I came across a lead.

Back in the eighties, Maffetone published a slim manual called In Fitness and in Health. Inside, I spotted a name I recognized: Hal Walter, a pro burro racer I’d met in Colorado during an annual ultramarathon in which athletes run up and down a mountain alongside a pack burro. Prize money on the burro-racing circuit is pretty lean, so in the off-season Hal was a freelance editor and outdoors writer. That’s how he met Phil Maffetone; in exchange for edits, Hal got fat-as-fuel training. Whatever tips Maffetone gave him must have been gold: Hal won his seventh world championship in fifteen years, at age fifty-three, and could still average seven minutes per mile for thirty miles, at thirteen thousand feet. During races that can last five or more hours, he only sips water.

I contacted Hal, who agreed to pass my message along to Maffetone. A week or so later, I received an e-mail from “pm.” No name, just the two lowercase letters. If I was interested in talking, pm said, I should come to Oracle, Arizona.

Our home isn’t that easy to find. Call when you get close and I’ll talk you in. If your cell phone works. Don’t count on it.

So I was off to Oracle, a lonely desert outpost best known for UFO sightings and the occasional underground meth lab. Not far away is Biosphere 2, a self-contained environmental experiment constructed there deliberately to avoid being noticed by, basically, anyone. Edward Abbey had the same idea: decades ago, the irascible writer and eco-warrior began using Oracle as his mailing address so no one would know where he was. Geographically and psychologically, Oracle is out there.

I followed pm’s directions, crossing an old railroad track and rumbling down a dusty, red-dirt road until I pulled up at a pleasant little cottage ringed by an artful garden of desert plants. Chickens scratched in the side yard, then scattered behind the cacti when the door opened and a lean, handsome man with a snow-white ponytail stepped out.

“Was I really that hard to find?” Maffetone asked.

“You mean the drive? Not so bad. But the rest—”

Maffetone shrugged and led me inside to meet his wife, Dr. Coralee Thompson, a physician who for fifteen years was medical director at Philadelphia’s Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential. “People seem to think I just went up in smoke like a genie.”

In Maffetone’s eyes, his sudden transformation from Dr. Ironman into InvisiPhil was a logical step. Fat-as-fuel was an intellectual challenge, and once he’d solved it—neatly, effectively, solid as a mathematical proof—it was on to the next endeavor. “I’ve had original music in my head since I was three years old,” he says. “It was time to do something about it.” So he shuttered his practice, referred his clients, rented his New York home, and rambled across the country until he found a place where he wouldn’t be disturbed or tempted back into endurance sports.

Which, he’s too polite to say, is exactly what I’m doing. The whole reason he settled out here, alone with coyote howls and Coralee and the guitar Johnny Cash gave him, was specifically to avoid people like me. But when he saw my message, he was intrigued; once Maffetone understood what I was up to, he spotted a connection I’d missed. I’d been wondering whether Paddy and Xan and their Cretan accomplices could have survived their long adventures through the mountains because they’d learned to tap into fat as fuel, but Maffetone realized something else.

“Do you know the healthiest diet in the world?” he asked.

“The Mediterranean?”

“Right. Do you know where it’s from?

“Greece?”

“Close,” he said. “Crete.”

Crete was both the strangest and most enduring result of Ancel Keys’s Seven Countries Study. Keys’s goal was to pin down the lifestyle causes of heart attacks and strokes, so for twelve years—from 1958 to 1970—his team gathered biological markers from men aged forty to fifty-nine, in Italy, Japan, Yugoslavia, Finland, Holland, America, and Greece. It really was a noble experiment; in his own way, Keys was trying to save millions of lives by demonstrating that cardiovascular disease was an active choice, not an Act of God. No one disputes the data Keys collected; they just argued that he should have included regions that didn’t necessarily fall in line with his saturated-fat-is-fatal theory.

For Greece, Keys took most of his subjects from Crete. It was a rare opportunity to travel back in time, because life in those mountain villages hadn’t changed in three hundred years. Cretan farmers were still living like their ancestors; they used the same rough tools, ate the same foods, slept in the same huts, and raised sheep descended from the same family flock. If Keys was right, and heart attacks were the result of a decadent modern lifestyle, then these Middle Age throwbacks should be fantastically healthy. And they were—except for one weird twist. The Cretans had the lowest rate of heart disease in the entire study, yet their serum cholesterol was high and they ate a ton of fat, more than any other country in the study. Nearly half of the calories that went down a Cretan’s throat came from fat. Going by Keys’s model, heart disease should have been all over those mountains. Instead, the Cretans lived long and stayed strong.

So why were Cretans more heart healthy than everyone else, including the Japanese, who consumed only a quarter as much fat? The secret was partly what they ate—meat, butter, fish, olive oil, wild greens, and walnuts—but mostly what they didn’t: sugar and starch. Unlike the rest of the industrialized world, Crete wasn’t jolted by World War II into a new way of eating. Much of postwar Europe and Asia desperately needed aid, so cattle and dairy farms were repurposed to raise grain; in a pinch, bread and porridge could fill more bellies and wouldn’t spoil in transit. Twenty years before Keys showed up with his research team, Finland had already begun converting grazing pasture into wheat fields and rows of sugar beets, which were processed into an all-purpose additive akin to high-fructose corn syrup. “During the Great Depression of the 1930s,” a Finnish economic analysis noted, the government “encouraged farmers to shift from exportable animal products to basic grains, a policy that kept farm incomes from falling as rapidly as they did elsewhere and enabled the country to feed itself better.” One result: more Finns died of heart disease than anyone else in the Seven Countries study.

Prosperity was its own peril in the United States. Giant factories constructed to feed the troops were now turning their attention to the family home, using wartime technologies to churn out canned soups, easy-grab snacks, and packaged bread. Orange juice, an exotic treat before the war, was suddenly everywhere; military contractors had figured out how to make frozen concentrate, and as soon as growers realized it could be sold as a “health” food, orange juice production skyrocketed from barely a quarter-million gallons a year to more than 115 million. Three out of every four Americans soon had OJ in the freezer, right next to another new sensation: frozen TV dinners, prepackaged with plenty of sugar, salt, and hydrogenated vegetable oil. In 1951, Kellogg’s rolled out its twin juggernauts—Sugar Frosted Flakes and Sugar Pops—then removed even the need for milk by inventing Pop-Tarts. The Great American Breakfast of bacon and eggs was becoming a dinosaur, along with home-cooked dinners, locally baked bread, and backyard gardens. Sucrose, fructose, corn syrup, and bleached white flour—the difference between dinner and dessert had disappeared.

But up in the mountains of Crete, nothing had changed. Most villages were self-sustaining and barely reachable by road, so they remained untouched by the flood of starch and sugars engulfing the rest of the world. The Cretans kept foraging for wild plants, baking rough millet into loaves as chewy as jerky, frying free-range eggs in home-pressed olive oil, and eating every part of the sheep but the baa. Potatoes were rare in the rocky highlands; rice was unheard of; pastries were an occasional indulgence and nearly as jawbreaking as the bread. The Cretans, in other words, were eating the same high-performance food as their Olympic-athlete ancestors.

“Like this,” Phil Maffetone said as we sat down with Coralee for lunch. They’d prepared steak—sliced thin and blood rare—alongside a jumbled salad of torn greens, tomatoes, cucumbers, and homemade goat-milk feta glistening with olive oil and sprinkled with fresh aromatic herbs. Break it down to raw components and it’s the same food that Paddy and Xan survived on during their time in the caves: all slow-burn, all the time. “Those Resistance fighters couldn’t have gotten their calories from starch and sugar, because it just wasn’t available,” Maffetone explains. “If they could only eat on the run, they needed food that would provide steady caloric energy all day.” Greek battlefields didn’t have Gatorade stations. Fugitives couldn’t detour in search of snacks. Survival depended on two things: choosing slow-burn food and adapting your body to use it.

Maffetone was very late figuring this out, of course, at least compared with Pythagoras. The pioneering mathematician also had a side interest in sports science, and after he settled in Croton in the sixth century B.C., the city suddenly began churning out champions. At one Games, Croton swept the top seven places in the two-hundred-yard stadion race while winning both the boxing and wrestling crowns. Pythagoras’s son-in-law, Milo of Croton, became ferocious enough in hand-to-hand combat to lead the annihilation of the kingdom of Sybaris and skillful enough in wrestling to rack up more victories than any other Olympian, a total of thirty-one victories over a twenty-four-year career.

And what contributed to their success?

“Pythagoras experimented with a special meat diet,” it’s reported, which was so effective that historians have battled for centuries over who deserves credit. Pausanias says it was Dromeus (“the Runner”) who “proved true to his name” and dominated the distance events at four Games after he “conceived the idea of a flesh diet.” A rival school says Pythagoras got there first; his student Milo “was famous for his meat consumption half a century before Dromeus is supposed to have discovered its efficacy in building up champion athletes.” Ancient Greek trainers became so sophisticated in the nuances of slow-burn fueling that they could split hairs over “the relative merits of deep-sea versus in-shore fish based on what type of seaweed they would likely have eaten.” On pork, there was no dissent; they all agreed you wanted to steer clear of pigs who’d foraged for crabs along the riverbanks and stick to the ones who fed on acorns and cornel berries.

But here’s where the story gets strange: Milo retired, Pythagoras got into a political jam and moved away, and just like that, Croton was finished. No more sprinting laurels. No more titanic fighters. Whatever Croton was doing right, it wasn’t doing it anymore. There’s no record of Croton ever winning another title at the Games. The city didn’t suddenly run out of strong young men or acorn-fattened ham, but whatever the magic was, it was gone.

“Food is only half the equation,” Maffetone explains. “You can have the finest fuel in the world, but it’s useless without the proper engine. It’s two systems. It’s input—what you eat—and output—how it’s converted. But here’s the funny part: it’s really, really, simple.”

“For anyone, or just seasoned athletes?”

“Anyone.”

“How long does it take to learn?”

“Two weeks. Two weeks and you can master it. Two weeks and you’ll be running on fat like your Resistance fighters.”

I pushed my notebook toward him across the table.

Maffetone began scrawling notes. To give him time, I got up to help clear the table. Maybe I’d take a walk with Coralee until—

“Here you are.” He couldn’t have written more than a dozen sentences. I sat back down and started to read. Really? It’s that easy?

Phil picked up the guitar and played me some of his songs. When it started getting late, Coralee packed me some of her special fat-as-fuel snacks for the road. Then I was heading home to see what the Maffetone Method could really do.

STEP 1: THE 2-WEEK TEST

Maffetone underlined “Test” in my notebook to make sure I got the point: this is emphatically Not a Diet. Diets, he believes, are a joke. They’re based on a stupid, shame-based notion that losing weight is a matter of willpower and sacrifice, that you’re heavy only because you’re too lazy to starve yourself down to size. “It’s baffling anyone still believes that, but they do,” Maffetone told me. “Even when it’s so clearly, visibly, unnatural.” Humans are hunter-gatherers; we’re born to search for food all day, every day, and scarf it down once we find it. Going hungry is the opposite of everything we’ve evolved to do.

So eat all you want, Maffetone urges. Just reboot your belly so it craves the food we’ve always hunted and gathered, not the fake stuff we’ve come to rely on. Once you’ve detoxed from the starch cycle and brought your body back to its natural metabolism, he says, you’ll be free of hunger pangs and afternoon sugar crashes and midnight munchies. It only takes fourteen days, as long as you follow one rule of thumb: nothing high-glycemic. Nothing that jacks your blood sugar, in other words, and causes insulin to start storing fat.

By the end of two weeks I should be a fresh slate, glycemically speaking, and no longer cycling from sugar surge to sugar surge. Then, once the test is over, I can gradually add processed carbs back to my meals and see what happens. If I eat a slice of bread and feel fine, okay. But if it makes me feel bloated, sluggish, or sleepy, I’ll know it’s too much starch for my body to metabolize efficiently. That’s what the 2-Week Test is all about; it’s designed to reactivate your natural diagnostic panel, so that instead of relying on some diet book to tell you what to eat, you’ll get instant, accurate feedback from your own body. “You’ll actually know what it feels like to have normal insulin levels and optimal blood sugar,” Maffetone explains.

So when I get home, I go shopping. I fill the cart with steak, fish, broccoli, avocados, canned squid, tuna, tomato juice, romaine lettuce, sour cream, and cashews—tubs of cashews, because they’ll be my go-to temptation snuffer. Also on the “yes” list: eggs, cheese, whole cream, dry white wine, Scotch, and salsa.

But no fruit, breads, rice, potatoes, pasta, or honey. No beans, which means no tofu or soy of any stripe. No chips, no beer, no milk or yogurt. No deli ham or roast beef, either, since they’re often cured in sugar. Turkey was fine if you cooked it yourself, but even then you have to be careful. I thought I’d hit the perfect multi-meal solution when I came across a stack of small Butterballs in the frozen food section, and only as an afterthought did I check the label and discover they were sugar-injected.

“Garbanzos are pretty moderate glycemically,” I emailed Maffetone after I’d done a little research on my own. “So I’d like to lobby for hummus.”

“Rule #1 of Step #1,” he replied. “No lobbying.”

The trick, I soon discovered, is solving one meal at a time. Breakfast was easy: by some whim I discovered that those $1.98 cans of squid from the Mexican food aisle are great in an omelette, so I’d fry up one of those, douse it with salsa, and be a happy man the rest of the morning. I kept cashews and spicy meat-sticks on hand throughout the day as snacks, and learned to add a splash of whole cream to my coffee instead of half-and-half. Lunch and dinner were only borderline crises when I got distracted and let myself get ravenous before planning what to eat.

By the end of Day 2, I felt like I had things under control—and then I stepped outside.

STEP 2: THE 180 FORMULA

I was barely a half-mile into an easy run and whoa! Why was my head spinning? I walked it off and began trotting again, but after another half-mile, I was bone-weary and panting. I wasn’t tired, exactly; whenever I stopped running, I felt strong and rested and ready to go. But as soon as I began to push a little, my energy drained and that damn beeping started all over again.

For Step 2, Maffetone had me wearing a runner’s heart rate monitor, a basic model with a chest strap and wristwatch console. The alarm was set to go off just before I hit my fat-burning threshold, which I’d calculated according to Maffetone’s quick-and-easy equation. To figure out your fat-burning zone, you subtract your age from 180 and then fine-tune by this scale:

If you’ve been sidelined for a while with injury or illness, subtract another 5.

If you’ve been sidelined a long time (like recovering from a heart attack), subtract 10.

If you’ve been training at least four times a week for two years, add 0.

If you’ve trained hard for two years and are progressing in competition, add 5.

In my case, it works like this:

I’m fifty years old, so 180 – 50 = 130.

I run regularly and haven’t been injured, putting me in category C: no additional points.

So: My fat-burning threshold is 130 heartbeats per minute.

That means I can work out as long, as fast, and as strenuously as I please, but whenever my heart rate hits 130 and my wrist alarm starts beeping, I have to ease off until my pulse drops back below the threshold. Maffetone believes your body is content to burn fat as long as it’s not being pushed into oxygen debt. When you need more air, your heart begins to hammer; when your heart is pounding fast, it demands fast-burn fuel. So to wean yourself off sugar, you have to change both supply and demand: you cut the sugar from your diet and keep your pulse within your fat-burning zone.

Maffetone hit on the formula because of a happy accident. Heart rates “can be as low as 30 to 40 in those with great aerobic function to as high as 220 or higher in young athletes during all-out efforts,” Maffetone explained. Using those numbers as his range, he originally put clients through extensive physiological tests to determine precisely when their metabolism kicked over from fat to sugar. After a few years of playing with the numbers, he realized he could just subtract their age from 180 and get the same results as if he’d done the testing. Why the math works, Maffetone can’t say. It just does.

“One-eighty minus age itself is not a meaningful number,” he explained. “It is not associated with VO2 max, lactate threshold, or other traditional measurements.” It’s just a shortcut to the end number: your maximum aerobic heart rate. Maffetone was delighted, because the magic equation allowed him to stop being the middleman between the athletes and their bodies. Maffetone believes the more you understand your own internal signals and stop listening to other people—even to him—the healthier you’ll be. That was the beauty of the 180; it was so simple, anyone willing to invest fifty bucks in a heart-rate monitor could be their own sports-science lab.

Maffetone has tested it on hundreds of athletes, including triathlon legends like Mike Pigg and Mark Allen, and they’ve consistently come back with the same results: they recover faster from workouts, blow past their old records in competition, and leave chronic injuries behind. One reason they rarely get hurt is that they’re no longer gritting through fatigue. When you go into oxygen debt, your form crumbles. Your head drops, your feet thump, your knees go cockeyed. You get sloppy, and you pay for it. “It was obvious that training at various intensities affected both posture and gait,” Maffetone explained. “The more anaerobic, the more distortion of the body’s mechanics.”

“But if you’re always going slow,” I’d asked, “how do you ever get fast?”

“You work your way up a few heartbeats at a time.”

You adapt. The more workouts you do in the fat-burning zone, the easier they get; the easier they get, the faster you can go. Maffetone predicted my workouts would feel ridiculously slow for the first few weeks. If you’re used to running eight minutes a mile, he said, you might have to throttle back to ten and walk the hills to stop your heart-rate alarm from beeping. But you’ll become so good at running ten-minute miles, he promised, you’ll eventually be able to trot up any hill without breaking the 130-beat barrier. Before long, I should be able to run faster—and farther—than ever without hitting my heart-rate threshold or running low on fuel.

“Oh, and another thing,” Maffetone added. “Don’t be surprised if you feel a little bit, um … awful.” When your body is denied its sugar supply, it can get grouchy.

Ugh. I saw what he meant about four minutes into the first run. Fatigue kept washing in and out like waves; I’d be clipping along easily, then suddenly feel like I coming down with the flu. It would pass after a few minutes of woozy walking, only to come roaring back shortly after I started running again. It was the eeriest sensation, like being yanked back and forth by a tug-of-war inside my own digestive system.

WE NEED SUGAR!

Shut your pie-hole, we’re fine. Onward.

Maffetone had warned me to expect this, though, so I trudged on home and braced for a rough few days ahead.

Instead, I was greeted on the next morning’s run by a pleasant surprise: instead of head spins, I got beeping. My heart-rate monitor began to chirp while I was a few hundred yards up an easy climb, and it dawned on me that I hadn’t gotten dizzy yet. The storm had passed; it was as if my body had given up the fight and surrendered the secret fuel stash it was hoarding. Now my challenge was keeping the damn wrist alarm quiet. Every time I got into a groove and started to leg it out a little—beep beep beep. Hills were the worst. I tried taking long, deep belly-breaths in hopes of Zen-mastering my pulse down a few blips, but it didn’t help much. I spent that whole day—and the next, and the next—creaking along like a cyclist in granny gear.

At least Dutch skaters were going through the same thing. Back in the early ’90s, the Dutch national speed skating team also began experimenting with low heart-rate training. It was a valiant quest, because as much as the Dutch love their skating, they were still up against ever more daunting powerhouses like the United States, Norway, and Canada. But despite the stiffening competition, the Dutch eased back; they replaced hard workouts with easier ones. In the seventies, 80 percent of their workouts were high-intensity; that total dwindled to 50 percent in 1992 and just 30 percent by 2010. It wasn’t as if they were putting in more ice time, either. “We first hypothesized that the total amount of training hours would have been increased over the years. Our analyses showed that this was not the case,” a research team concluded in 2014, after analyzing thirty-eight years of Dutch training logs. “Surprisingly, there was no increase in net training hours,” the researchers added, “while performance increased considerably.”

Considerably. Now that’s a gentle way to put it. The Dutch destroyed. At the 2014 Winter Olympics, Dutch skaters crushed the field so relentlessly, on-air commentators complained it was bad for the sport. Together, Dutch men and women came home with twenty-three of thirty-six possible medals. Never in the history of the Games has one nation won so many gold medals in a single event. “The domination of their speed skating athletes has been total, with traditional rivals such as the USA, Canada and Norway utterly humiliated,” the British Guardian summed it up.

The Dutch secret was as old as the Games themselves. The key to going fast, the Greeks believed, was a long time going slow. They called it “fatigue work,” and until an ancient Greek athlete was twenty years old, he did little else. Fatigue work was raw, Rocky IV–style stuff: hiking mountains, carrying a heavy rock up and down a hill, climbing a rope slung over a tree branch, and the Ecplethrisma—running back and forth across the hundred-foot plethron, taking one step less every lap until you reached zero. The godfather of fatigue work, of course, was Milo of Croton; he came up with the idea of hoisting a newborn calf over his shoulders and carrying it around the stadium every day, gradually getting stronger as the heifer got bigger.

On the last day of my 2-Week Test, I tried a Milo of Croton experiment of my own. It was time to tally the results of my Maffetone immersion, which for me really boiled down to one question: was fat-as-fuel for real? Was it easy, sustainable, and effective? If by now I couldn’t do more on less food—and find that food easily and eat it on the fly—then Maffetone’s approach didn’t explain how Paddy and Xan and their Cretan brothers-in-arms got stronger as life got harder.

Already I knew that in two out of three categories, Maffetone was scoring high. I’d lost eleven pounds in those two weeks, trimming me back to the same weight I’d been as a college rower nearly thirty years ago. I felt more like that teenage athlete again, too; not just skinnier but springier, more revved and rested. One afternoon I was about to head out for a run and suddenly remembered I’d done an hourlong Erwan-style workout that morning. I’d recovered so thoroughly, I felt fresh enough already to do it all over again. So I did. Even more surprising was the change that came over food: good old standbys like pizza, cheesesteaks, and doughnuts now seemed untempting and kind of gross. Soon I’d be allowed to ease them back into my meals, but it was hard to imagine why I’d want to.

The final exam, though, was out there on the Hill, the same place that made me woozy the first day and kept my heart-rate monitor beeping the next five. Since then, I’d stayed away. It was too aggravating. Even when I thought I’d adapted enough to glide to the top, the alarm always buzzkilled me down to a walk before I made it halfway. On this last day, though, I hit it just right. I warmed up on the approach and then backed off, easing into the climb. When I sensed I was passing the spot where I’d maxed out the first day, I didn’t even turn my head to check. I kept eyes straight and everything else loose, trying to roll up and over this thing with my pulse slow-thumping in the fat-burning zone. Over and over in my mind, I looped the words of a wise old friend: “First focus on easy,” Micah True used to say. “Because if that’s all you get, that ain’t so bad.”

Halfway came and went without a beep, and I knew I had it. Why not? If Milo could work his way up to a thousand-pound bull, I should be able to handle a half-mile hill. The top was just steps away. I just had to remember to—

BEEP BEEP BEEP.

Breathe. Breathe, you idiot! So close, and I blew it by getting anxious and holding my breath. Still, if I could get that far on just fourteen days of adapting to fat-as-fuel, there was no telling how far I could get after a few months. Probably up and over the tallest mountain on Crete.