They were exhausted and hungry, but they couldn’t give themselves more than a few hours to rest. Every day they spent in the same location increased the risk of getting trapped inside a German dragnet or tracked to their hideout if Hitler’s Wolf showed up. Troops were already mobilizing to cut off their escape route on the far side of Mount Ida. “Large numbers of Germans are concentrating around the foothills of this mountain and there is every reason to believe a full-scale drive over the area is imminent,” the guerrillas told Billy.
Paddy saw only one way out: Solvitur Ambulando. When in doubt, walk. Billy agreed: “We have decided that the best course for us is to make the long climb over Ida’s crest and the descent down its southern slopes before the German action has time to develop.” They’d wait until nightfall, then do their best to get over Ida and into a fresh hideout before daybreak. If they were caught, it would be on the run.
Paddy and Billy leaned back under a jagged crack running alongside the cave mouth and snatched a few moments of morning sun before going back undercover. Even though it was a top-secret operation, someone fished out a camera and snapped a shot, capturing one last image of the two tired men on what would likely be the last day of their lives.
“That’s the crack,” Chris White said. “Drop down and I’ll show you.”
I took a seat in the dirt and leaned back against the rock. Chris snapped a photo, then held it next to one he’d scanned from 1944. The details were identicaclass="underline" my head was right under the same crack, resting exactly where Paddy was before trying to get over Ida. Chris and I had just finished the trek from Anogia, and we’d accidentally put ourselves in a similar situation. We’d set off before dawn with no food, expecting to eat at an inn at the base of the mountain. But the inn was closed, the sun was going down, and the snow-capped peak loomed eight thousand feet overhead.
There was only one way they could have pulled it off. Paddy and his gang must have been tapping into an ancient source of energy to power their way up Ida: they must have figured out how to use their own body fat as performance fuel. It’s a technique as old as human existence and the secret of some of the greatest athletic performances in endurance sports, as a broken-down Ironman was surprised to discover.
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.