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

CHRISTOPHER MCDOUGALL is the author of Born to Run: The Hidden Tribe, the Ultra-Runners and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen and a former war correspondent for the Associated Press, covering wars in Rwanda and Angola. He now lives and write (and runs, swims, climbs, and bear-crawls) among the Amish farms around his home in rural Pennsylvania.

ALSO BY CHRIS TOPHER MCDOUGALL

Born to Run: The Hidden Tribe, the Ultra-Runners, and
the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen

The Lost Secrets of
Strength and Endurance

Christopher McDougall

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by
PROFILE BOOKS LTD
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Bevin Way
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First published in the United States of America in 2015 by
Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House

Copyright Christopher McDougall, 2015
Map illustration by Robert Bull

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN 978 1 84765 933 0

To my parents, John and Jean McDougall.
Anything which I have done
which you may consider worthwhile,
as Howard Hughes once said,
has been made possible
by the genius of my father.

Tradition carries a nasty wallop.

JOURNALIST HEYWOOD BROUN,
as he watched an old boxer destroy a young challenger in 1922

CHAPTER 1

YOUVE GOT TO PUT YOURSELF in the Butchers shoes.

Youre General Friedrich-Wilhelm Mller, one of two German commanders on the Greek island of Crete. Hitler is worried that something terrible is about to happen right under your nose, something that could severely damage the German offensive, but youve got it all under control. The island is small and your manpower is huge. Youve got 100,000 seasoned troops, with search planes prowling the mountains and patrol boats monitoring the beaches. Youve got the Gestapo at your service, and youre scary enough to be called the Butcher. No one is going to mess with you.

And then you wake up on the morning of April 24, 1944, to discover the other you is gone. Your fellow commander, General Heinrich Kreipe, has disappeared. Theres no hint of foul play: no shots fired, no bloodshed, no signs of a scuffle. Stranger yet, the general vanished from somewhere around the capital, the most heavily guarded corner of the island. Whatever happened, it happened right in front of the generals own men. Kreipe was no toy soldier, either; he was a serious hard case, a Great War survivor with an Iron Cross whod battled his way up through the ranks and just transferred in from the Russian front. He had a personal security force and an armed driver and a villa surrounded by attack dogs, razor wire, and machine-gun posts.

So where was he?

All the Butcher knew was this: shortly after 9 P.M., General Kreipe left his command base and drove into the center of town. It was Saturday, so foot traffic was thicker than usual. Troops from outlying garrisons had been bused in for a movie, and the streets were jammed with strolling soldiers. The movie had just let out; the Butcher knew this because hundreds of soldiers had seen the black sedan with the generals flags on the bumper inching its way through the streets. General Kreipes driver had to honk them out of the way, even rolling down his window at one point to holler, GENERALS WAGEN! Kreipe was right there in the front passenger seat, nodding his head and returning salutes. Every road in every direction at every half-mile was guarded by checkpoints. The generals car passed Gestapo headquarters and funneled through the last checkpoint, the narrow opening at the Canae Gate. Gute Nacht, the generals driver called. The sedan slid beneath the crossbar and exited the city.

Early the next morning, the generals car was discovered on a scruff of beach just outside the city. The general and his driver were gone, as were the eagle flags from the front bumper. Around the car was a weird scattering of rubbish: an Agatha Christie novel, Cadbury milk chocolate wrappers, a bunch of English Players cigarette butts, and a green British commando beret. On the dashboard was a letter. It was addressed to The German authorities on Crete and said that Kreipe had been captured by a British raiding force and taken off the island. The letter was ceremonially sealed with red wax and signet rings, and included a jaunty postscript:

We are very sorry to have to leave this beautiful motor car behind.

Something didnt add up. The general must have been grabbed after he left the city, but his car was found only a twenty-minute drive away. So within that brief window, these mystery men had executed an ambush, disarmed and subdued two prisoners, smoked a pack of cigarettes, shared some snacks, lost a hat, melted wax, and what elsebrowsed a paperback? Was this an abduction or a family vacation? Plus that stretch of coast was floodlit by klieg lights and patrolled by planes. Why would seasoned commandos choose the most exposed part of the island as their extraction point? From that beach, their escape boat would have to head north into hundreds of miles of German-occupied waters, making them sitting ducks as soon as the sun came up.

Whoever did this was trying very hard to look very British, very cool and under control. But the Butcher wasnt buying it. He was in the midst of his second World War and to his knowledge, no general had ever been kidnapped before. There was no precedent for this sort of thing, no tactics, so they had to be making it up as they went along. Which meant that sooner or later, theyd make a blunder and fall right into his hands. Already, theyd made a big mistake: theyd badly underestimated their opponent. Because the Butcher had seen through their feints and realized two things:

They were still on his island, and they were running for their lives.

CHAPTER 2

Those brave in killing will be killed.
Those brave in not killing will live.

LAO-TZU

ON A SPRING MORNING IN 2012, I stood where the generals car was found, wondering the same thing as the Butcher: where could they possibly go?

At my back is the Aegean Sea. In front, theres nothing but a snarl of chest-high brambles leading to a sheer cliff. In the far distance and cutting the island in half like a giant border fence is the craggy range of snowy Mount Ida, the highest climb in Greece. The only possible escape is the southern coast, but the only way to get there is up and over that eight-thousand-foot peak. The trek alone would be a challenge, but pulling it off with a belligerent prisoner in tow and a massive manhunt hot on your heels? Impossible.