“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.
CHAPTER 33
I was quite wrong. Sorry, everyone.
—DR. TIMOTHY NOAKES
I WAS FAMISHED by the time I met Dr. Noakes in the lobby of his Washington, D.C., hotel and figured we’d head straight out to eat. It was pushing 1 P.M., and Noakes had been stuck in a conference all morning discussing, among other things, his biggest professional mistake. We just had time for a hearty lunch before his flight back home to South Africa. But Noakes had other ideas.
“I won’t eat until tomorrow,” he said. “Or the next day.”
“You go two days without food?”
“Or more. Sometimes I’ve got to stop and think to remember my last meal.”
Looking at him, it’s hard to believe. At sixty-four, Noakes is tall and fit as a lumberjack, with the rangy look of the college rower he once was and the barely contained energy of a man whose mind is a constantly expanding to-do list. Everything about him seemed to demand constant refueling—his locked-in focus when listening, his Christmas-morning grin when amused, the unruly brown hair barely touched by time or a comb. It would all make sense, Noakes promised, when I heard his story. He suggested we grab coffee and get right to it. He had a lot to get off his chest.
“It’s really funny when you think how chance events occur,” he begins. In 2010, Noakes was finally reaching the end of a grim crusade. Back in 1981, he suspected joggers were being tricked into drinking themselves to death. Companies like Gatorade were pushing the idea that runners needed lots of fluids to avoid dehydration, and the race directors and running magazines who depend on sponsorship and advertising were quick to join the chorus. Suddenly, you could barely run a mile in a race without someone handing you a cup. Runners were told, “Drink until your eyeballs float,” and “Don’t just rely on thirst.”
But hang on; when did thirst suddenly become unreliable? For millions of years, it’s been fantastically effective. In fact, it’s one of the most important aspects of our evolutionary development: humans lived or died by their ability to lope long on hot days, and the reason we survived is that our bodies told us when and how much to drink. It was precisely because we’re resistant to dehydration that we could run other animals to death. “Humans evolved to be extremely adept long-distance runners with an unmatched ability to regulate their body temperatures when exercising in the heat,” Noakes knew. “And our brains developed the ability to delay the need to drink—a crucial adaptation if we were to chase after our potential meals in the midday heat when there was little water available and no time to stop the hunt to search for fluid.”
Noakes began checking the habits of runners from the pre-Gatorade era and discovered that old-school marathoners had no trouble going dry. “I only chew gum. I take no drink at all,” Matthew Maloney said after he set the marathon world record in 1908. Mike Gratton won the London Marathon in 1983 without a single sip, and Arthur Newton, the legendary ultrarunner and five-time Comrades champion, believed, “Even in the warmest English weather, a 26-mile run ought to be manageable with no more than a single drink or, at most, two.” To this day, the San people of the Kalahari can run up to seven hours in heat of 108º Fahrenheit on just a few swallows.
So now all of a sudden the American College of Sports Medicine, with major funding by its first platinum sponsor—Gatorade—was declaring, “Thirst may be an unreliable index of fluids needed during exercise”? Something else was fishy: the fifty-six-mile Comrades race never had a problem with dehydration and heat illness before it set up regular aid stations. “This paradox did not escape me,” Noakes points out. “How could ‘dehydration and heat illness’ have become a significant problem in marathon and ultramarathon running after frequent drinking had become the accepted norm?”
Nothing added up—least of all the corpses. When Noakes researched postrace body weights, he found something peculiar: elite runners pump out more sweat than the midpack plodders. If dehydration were truly a danger, how did the elites even make it to the finish line? Logically, the faster runners should be knocked off their feet. Instead, they’re stronger than everyone else in the field. And when Noakes went looking for all those marathoners who supposedly keeled over from too little to drink, he found …
None.
Not one. Ever. “There is not a single report in the medical literature of dehydration being a proven, direct cause of death in a marathon runner,” Noakes discovered.