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Natural Born Heroes, in detail
Natural Born Heroes is Christopher McDougall's follow-up to Born to Run, and it attempts something equally ambitious: to argue that heroism is a trainable physical and psychological skill, and that the human body contains natural capacities for endurance, power, and resilience that modern life has systematically atrophied. McDougall organizes the book around one of the most audacious military operations of World War II — the kidnapping of a German general from occupied Crete by a small band of British Special Operations agents and Cretan resistance fighters — and uses it as a lens for examining what ordinary humans can do when trained correctly and motivated fully.
The central military story is genuinely gripping. Patrick Leigh Fermor, a young British adventurer with no formal military training, together with W. Stanley Moss and a handful of Cretan partisans, captured General Heinrich Kreipe on a mountain road and walked him across the mountains of Crete for weeks while the entire German garrison searched for them. McDougall researched the operation in depth and tells it with narrative verve. The historical story alone would make the book worth reading.
Around this narrative, McDougall weaves his investigation of natural movement and heroism. He explores the philosophy of parkour and its claim that the human body is designed for varied, functional movement rather than gym-isolated exercise. He investigates Weston A. Price's research on traditional diets and their effect on physical capability. He revisits the science of fat adaptation — the ability to fuel long effort from fat stores rather than carbohydrates — and examines how some athletes and ancient communities maintained high endurance on minimal food intake.
McDougall is a journalist, not a scientist, and the book reflects that. The arguments are compellingly assembled but not rigorously defended. The connection between the historical narrative and the fitness philosophy is sometimes loose. But what the book does well — taking ideas from multiple fields and animating them through story — it does very well. It is a book about what humans are capable of, told through one of the most remarkable true stories of the war.
The big ideas
- 1.
Heroism, McDougall argues, is not a personality trait but a practiced skill — cultivated through physical hardship, communal belonging, and the development of practical capability.
- 2.
The Cretan resistance fighters who aided the German general's capture had no military training but possessed extraordinary endurance, local knowledge, and willingness to act under threat.
- 3.
Natural movement philosophy, as expressed through parkour and similar disciplines, holds that the human body evolved for varied, creative, whole-body movement and that modern training methods isolate muscles in ways that reduce functional capacity.
