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.