3.

WITNESS THE FITNESS

The hammering that I thought would never end finally subsides. Reality reasserts itself; the earth is no longer rippling. The silence is deafening, and then I hear a tinny scream, and I realize it’s me who’s screaming.

I’m trapped underneath something heavy. I shove and push, exploding with fear and anger.

I’m lucky. I’m alive. I’m just bruised, and I can move. Not much, but I can squirm. I frantically try to create some space around me. Something huge has landed on our car. The world is black, and my mouth is thick with grit.

Claustrophobia drives me, a bubbling terror, a spastic pressure. But the panic is building in my throat, behind my eyes: where are my wife and child? I see a tiny chink of daylight in the dark, and I attack it. Somehow I claw my way out, ripping skin and clothing, snaking and contorting. I tumble to the ground.

Dust swirls in curling serpents; the sunlight blazes in through open spaces. A piece of the concrete overpass, a thunderous weight, has sagged onto the car—not flatly, or I’d be dead, but at an angle. Broken glass glitters and shards lie everywhere. Car alarms blare, people are screaming.

Giant ships of freeway metal have broken free and slid down, the pieces leaning on each other precariously. High overhead, maybe sixty feet up, I can see the overpass, broken off, and a truck—an eighteen-wheeler—lying on edge, poised to slide down right on top of us.

My heart is beating so fast that I can feel it bubbling up into my throat. But there’s hope—there’s some space still in the car.

“HONEY?” I shout, and I can hear, in a detached way, how ragged my voice is, just on the edge of breaking. I throw myself at at the slab resting on the car, tearing at it, and I have a surreal sense of watching myself from far away.

“We’re here,” comes a distant voice, muffled, scared. “We’re okay. It’s tight, but we’re okay . . .”

Relief floods my body in an intensely tangible way. I can feel it flow down through my chest and into my limbs, a sweet, intense joy. I collapse, breath coming in ragged gasps.

But now I have to get them out of there, before the next tremor hits and that truck comes down.

—

All the know-how in the world won’t save you if you’re not strong enough to pull yourself up onto the roof of your house when the tsunami hits, or if you’re not fast enough to outrun the aliens. The one thing that is utterly and completely under your control is your own physical condition—you can get in shape.

Every scenario I run through my head has a massive physical component. Carrying my son in a backpack all day, hiking through a burnt-out Los Angeles. Fighting hand to hand with bandits. But there is another reason to stay fit: The physical is inextricably linked to the mental. The greater the fitness level, the higher the cognitive resilience to stress. In-shape athletes handle stress hormones better than out-of-shape people. The adrenaline dumps don’t affect their minds as badly.

If you’re in shape, you get to hang on to those fine motor skills a little longer.

I’ve proved it, in the cold light of day. When I was twenty-five I lived for about six months at a muay thai boxing camp in Thailand, training and fighting in the ring. My first fight was against a Japanese guy who was maybe twenty pounds heavier than me and a long time karate stylist—a heavyweight full-contact karate champion (or at least, that’s what his manager told me). He was a better fighter than me, and he caught me with a punch in the first round, a punch I never saw. I went out, donk, falling stiffly to the ground like a board.

At the time, I was in incredible shape—I’d been training twice a day for five months, running eight miles every morning, and living like a professional fighter. I was getting through ten hard rounds of pad work with legendary muay thai trainers.

I hit the ground and bounced up like a jack-in-the-box. I don’t remember it well but I have it on tape. I do remember the referee coming to give me my standing eight count, and I waved him off—because I saw my opponent was breathing harder than I was, even though he’d just knocked me on my ass. I could have had eight full seconds to clear my head, but I didn’t want it, because it would have given him time, too. I went after him, didn’t let him rest, and caught him with a knee right at the end of the round. He went down from it, but more from exhaustion than the force of the blow. He just wasn’t ready for the pace. His techniques, his abilities, and his experience far outstripped mine. I beat him with conditioning.

—

Lawndale, Ca

—I looked up at Sean Waxman, and his flat brown eyes offered no sympathy.

“Let’s go, Sam,” he said, in a tone that implies I was shirking my duty. I approached the bar, ready for an overhead snatch.

The Olympic snatch is a kind of revelation, an explosive movement—power and strength and flexibility all tied together with timing and grace. Let me tell you something right now: that shit ain’t easy. It had taken months of training just to get to this point, to attempt it. In one smooth motion, you lift the weight up off the ground, and then, explosively, you hurl yourself underneath it, bending your body into the overhead squat position, and lift the weight. You’ve seen those heavy Russian athletes, chalk on their hands and braces on their knees, holding a giant bending bar overhead until the lights go green, then dropping it with an earth-shattering crash. That’s the Olympic sport of weight-lifting.

I stood over the bar and bent down, gripping at the extreme ends, as far apart as possible. I controlled my breathing, set my back, and started to lift, first with my legs, keeping the bar close, and then flowing into the surge, bouncing the bar off my hips, somehow transferring the energy through my body. Up came the bar as my body dropped down . . . but I didn’t have it. The bar kept traveling, my body exploded like a broken spring underneath the weight, my legs splayed, and the bar smashed down behind me as I sprawled on the wooden platform.

“Well, that was ugly,” murmured Sean in the silence that followed. He never moved a muscle. No Omigodareyouokay, nothing like that. He sighed, almost imperceptibly. “Let’s try that again.”

So what the hell was I doing here?

Fitness is a relative term. On its own, it means nothing; only a specific goal gives it meaning. Sure, there is a general sense of being “in shape,” but really, that doesn’t mean much in the world of kinesiology. What are you fit for? Being in shape to run a marathon doesn’t mean you will be in shape to play tennis, although there will certainly be some crossover. A good tennis player will be able to run a long way; a good marathoner won’t get exhausted by a tennis match, but he won’t be exploding to the net, either. And neither of those would be much good as a powerlifter at a powerlifting competition. Furthermore, all three of those guys would wither in an amateur boxing match. I had a Division 1 soccer player once assure me, “I’m in shape, dude.” He “gassed” (as in, his gas tank ran empty) after just a few minutes of wrestling, because he wasn’t trained for it. He was way out of his comfort zone, holding his breath and straining. Stress did him in as much as anything. Wrestling isn’t soccer. I’m sure if we’d been on the soccer field he would have run circles around me for ninety minutes.

All fitness is sport specific, and should be viewed through the lens of specificity. What are you trying to accomplish?

I grew up in a world ruled by the idea of aerobic fitness: running was the answer to any fitness question. Boxing is still dominated by this idea. Even though boxing is divided into three-minute sprints and one-minute rests, almost all boxers run. If they don’t do roadwork they’re not training hard enough. The sweet science in this respect is more of a dark art, dominated by turn-of-the-century thinking (that’s twentieth, not twenty-first). Pro boxers get up and run six or eight miles every morning. Grizzled old veteran trainers shake their heads at modern science; they know what a fighter needs. Run, then run some more.

The weight lifting I grew up doing, taught by peers in high school gyms and workout magazines, was informed by bodybuilding, although I didn’t know it then. Exaggerated muscle size, called hypertrophy, is usually associated with strength. Generally, a bigger muscle is a stronger muscle; that’s the visual appeal to bodybuilders. And bodybuilders are pretty strong, compared to me. But that’s not the same thing as being powerful, which is about being strong and fast.

If you knew the end of the world was coming, if that was a sporting event you were preparing for, what would you do? Well, in the film Zombieland, the protagonist mentions that an important survival rule is “cardio,” but what he means is sprinting. Most sports are about sprinting, it turns out. Baseball, football, even soccer require less than ten seconds of intense bursts, followed by a lull. Apocalyptic scenarios are about sprinting too—think of Tom Cruise sprinting through the opening of War of the Worlds. Fighting, certainly, is about sprinting. What’s the difference between sprinting and distance running, in terms of training? I’m glad you asked.

Educating myself in the field of exercise was trickier than I had imagined it would be. There are too many differing opinions, too many workout styles. It’s a real maze, a rat’s nest of opinions. I tried to find a trainer guru and failed. I picked my way through a half-dozen books, notably Strength Training, from the National Strength and Conditioning Association, and Supertraining, by Yuri Verkhoshansky and Mel Siff. I spoke to Dr. Ralph Rozenek, a professor of kinesiology at Cal State Long Beach, whose specialty is “physiological responses to exercise.” I talked to a bevy of people, some frauds, some half-informed, some crazed conspiracy nuts, some possibly brilliant. A few were all those things at once.

Eventually, I found my way to Sean Waxman, he’d competed at the national level in Olympic lifting, won California state championships, and trained under Dr. John Garhammer, the preeminent expert in the United States on the biomechanics of weight lifting. When I say “weight lifting” from now on, I mean Olympic weight lifting, not preacher curls.

When I called Sean and introduced myself, his voice was gruff. As I tried to explain the project to him, I wandered off on a tangent: how would I get stronger in a postapocalyptic world without gyms?

There was a pause. “Uh, lift heavy shit,” said Sean.

—

Think of human energy as a continuum, a spectrum. Whenever you do something, there’s an electric and chemical reaction in the body that makes the muscles work, through a spectrum of systems. The various energy systems fire sequentially: You start off in the nervous system, the neuromuscular system. The brain, the nervous system, sends the electrical signal. Your muscles contain stores of a chemical compound called ATP, which responds to the electrical signal by causing the muscle to contract. Other chemical reactions are involved: read about the Huxley sliding filament theory and myostatin if you feel up to it.

The initial move is anaerobic—it doesn’t require air, you’re working with what’s inherent in the system, the stored electricity and chemical energy in your body. But if motion continues, you begin to metabolize glucose and you start to need air. And now the intensity (or strength) falls off. So during your first few repetitions, your body uses the anaerobic (ATP) system; by the tenth rep (some say thirty seconds of movement, some say two minutes) you move into glycolysis (which is metabolic: you’re metabolizing stored glucose); in the higher reps, you’re in the aerobic system. You’re strongest at first, when all the chemicals are loaded and the chemical receptors are primed to react. Strength falls off slowly, then quickly.

There are many different ways to talk about this: the ATP system, the ATP CP system, glycolysis, the lactic system, and so on. Some charts describe three energy pathways that are in the continuum; some charts have six or seven. But basically, as you move, your muscles use these differing systems in sequence.

The more research I did, the more confusing it got. Some evidence suggests that the aerobic system is actually in use from the beginning. Every time I turned around there was a new study. But the basic idea is sound and unchanging—that you want to train multiple energy systems to make them stronger, not just one. This is a pretty well-known and accepted idea in the sports-science world. Particularly, you have to train your short-term “sprint” system—the anaerobic system—to get better at sprinting. This training also helps your aerobic system: sprinting helps your distance running. But it doesn’t work the other way around. (Still, a lot of athletes—especially boxers—have been slow to change their training.)

The one truth I gleaned was that power is a function of the neuromuscular system—you need to train your nervous system as well as your muscles. The electrochemical pathway from the brain through the nervous system to the muscle needs to be fast and efficient. To get big muscles, bodybuilders lift slowly, with the muscle under tension, to tear the fibers. Their primary concern is muscle size. But for almost everyone else, speed is the primary concern. As they say, if you train slow, you’ll be slow. So athletes definitely shouldn’t be bodybuilding. Or only going on long, slow runs.

Olympic lifting is about the “one-repetition max” (1RM), meaning lifting the absolute maximum weight you can, by giving the absolute effort, one time. You have to lift fast, as fast as possible, in order to lift the most weight possible. This is primarily about the nervous system, about training the nerves to fire fast and efficiently. Sean told me that that in a massive experiment conducted at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, pound for pound, Olympic weightlifters were found to have the greatest level of speed and strength, more than any athletes in any other sport.

So BANG! Olympic lifting demands one big, quick move that’s not just about your muscles, it’s about how efficiently and powerfully your nervous system works in conjunction with your muscles. The amount of power you can summon is a measure of how well you can get those connections to work.

—

Waxman’s Gym in Lawndale is a warehouse, the utilitarian purpose of the gym its own aesthetic. There are no mirrors, just a huge open space with stacks of Olympic weights, lifting platforms, and bars. The cavernous space has a section walled off by bare wood: Sean Waxman’s apartment. He lives in the gym. To open for business, Sean rolls up the garage door.

When I met him, Sean looked like he lived in the gym, shaggy and unkempt. He had a rough beard, his hair was shoulder length and curly, and he dressed in sweatpants, flip-flops with socks, and a flannel shirt over his truly massive trunk. His appearance bordered on the ridiculous, but it came from the attitude: Who cares what I look like, that doesn’t matter. How much can I lift?

His body is a classic of the genre. He looks like a Russian weight lifter from the seventies, thick and beefy, not a sculpted Adonis. The Olympic weight lifter has an almost aggressive disdain for appearance: no six-pack abs, no tricep definition. How much weight can you get up over your head? That’s all they care about. The first day we met, Sean wore a T-shirt with a drawing of a set of brass knuckles and DEFEND THE SQUAT written on it; if somebody was gonna insult the squat, Sean was going to have a problem. I would eventually learn that he had that shirt in about twenty colors.

Sean, in his slightly combative Brooklyn accent, impressed me with the clarity of his thinking.

“What’s the best thing I should be doing?” I asked him. He gave me a wry grin.

“Thinking either best, or better will get you into trouble. Let’s talk about the essence of a lot of sports: it’s about getting to the point of attack before your opponent does,” Sean said. Working backward from that goal, the way to move the body is to apply force to the ground very quickly.

“I know people say, ‘Olympic lifting doesn’t resemble my sport, there’s no barbells in my sport’; but we’re training an attribute. You develop the skill of producing power, and that skill can be applied on the field, in the ring.”

Sean talked about how the fitness industry (boo, hiss) had taken the “training pie”—the various elements like mobility, strength, power, agility, and stability—and divided it up in order to focus on and monetize each element separately. Even though some of those things are easy to monetize and easy to train, separating them isn’t the best and most efficient way to improve performance.

“Strength is agility and stability. If you are filling up a box with rocks, strength is the biggest one—put that rock in first, then put the little ones in,” he muttered. It makes sense: the stronger your legs are, the easier it is to balance, to a certain extent.

The movements of the snatch and the clean and jerk take time and training with a decent coach. They can take hours or years to learn, but months is more likely, according to Sean.

For a raw guy like me, a newcomer with a short amount of time, Sean would teach only four exercises: the squat, the dead lift, the overhead press, and the “good-morning” (an old-school lower back strengthener).

“But,” he said, “the nervous system is the key to performance, and nothing out there stimulates the nervous system like the snatch, the clean and jerk, and their derivatives.”

Sean lent me an ancient, dog-chewed pair of his weight lifting shoes. They were sneakers with hard wooden soles and a slight heel. I clacked around the gym in them and felt ridiculous, like I was wearing dress shoes with shorts, even though everyone had them on.

At the start of our training, we performed another exercise considered old school, the back squat. Ye olde knees-past-ninety-degrees, deep-as-you-can-go back squat. You don’t see it that much in the gym these days, because it’s hard and considered dangerous. The way to avoid injury is to use the proper form and, most important, to use light weights until you’re strong enough to progress. I did the back squat with just the bar, forty-five pounds. I needed to learn an essential skill: how to make my torso into a solid block.

The torso is a wondrous thing. The spine and the ribs and the pelvis have an amazing range of movements. But for lifting heavy shit, you need to turn the torso into a single rod, a conduit of force. The more solid and stable it is, the stronger you’ll be and the less likely you are to injure yourself. Weight lifting is a neuromuscular skill that requires training. Neural pathways have to be learned and ingrained, and muscles need to get stronger.

The back has to be arched and locked, which forces you into a structurally sound position. Letting the back round will make you weak and lead to injury—or, worse in Sean’s eyes, “you won’t make the lift.”

Breathing is important for all lifts. For most weight lifting, I had been taught (probably by another kid in junior high) to exhale in a tight manner when doing the hard part of the lift. It relieves pressure and allows you to establish a rhythm for the ten to twelve repetitions you’re doing. That’s bodybuilding. Curls for the girls, as they say.

In Olympic lifting, you hold your breath. Sean said, “With a big breath, you create a brace of air inside the waist, into the upper back. This is sometimes called the Valsalva.”

Dr. Rozenek, of Cal Tech, explained, “Valsalva is defined as fixed expiration against closed glottis. The airway is closed, and by contracting musculature surrounding the thoracic cavity, in the chest and abdominals, you increase the intrathoracic pressure. By increasing the intrathoracic pressure you stabilize the spine.”

Sean went over the tightening sequence I had to learn to perform before lifting something. You have to practice doing this until it becomes second nature. As well as the Valsalva, you want to “Kegel,” or squeeze the pelvic muscles as though you’re preventing yourself from going to the bathroom.

Sean said, “Think of the pelvis as a bowl, and the spine is a spoon in the bowl, and the muscles radiate off it like spokes. If you set all those muscles tautly, you keep the wheel true.”

For the big lift—the 1RM, the maximal effort—you hold your breath. It’s anaerobic.

Learning the skill of how to properly set the back and torso, to perform the Valsalva and Kegel and straighten—all at the same time, all as instinct—is a huge survival component. Not only are you stronger, but you are lifting properly and safely. Injury prevention and sustainability have got to be priorities in a long-term grid-down scenario. If you’re out hunting, deep in the woods, and a log falls on your buddy, you need to lift it off him quickly and properly. The set of the back and the torso has to become ingrained, natural, instantaneous. If the world is in chaos and there are no emergency rooms or pharmacies, getting back surgery will be a drag.

“It’s the essence of the essence,” Sean said with a smile. “Whether lifting weights or groceries, a strong stiff torso is the conduit, otherwise it’s not only inefficient, it’s unsafe. The skill is in absorbing energy, down through the torso. You learn to have the body in harmony, like an orchestra. If one instrument is off, you’ll feel it.

“When you get older and you hurt your back, they tell you to stop lifting things,” Sean continued. “So you restrict movement, you start limiting your life. You should lift more, but in the right way, to rebuild strength and functionality.”

Sean’s discourse was heavily laden with what I call the UTD, or Universal Trainer’s Disease: the unshakable belief that every other trainer out there is a fucking moron, a danger to themselves and others. Nearly every trainer I’ve ever met has felt this way: at best dismissive, at worst openly contemptuous and angry.

Sean was aware of it, and he even knew why it happens: something called the training effect, or the beginner’s effect. If a totally out-of-shape person starts training, they will get good results, no matter what they do. If they start running, or lifting weights, or doing kettlebells, or yoga, or Pilates . . . anything will help them. So the universal experience that many people have is they start doing X and it works. Now they become experts on and spokesmen for X. Everyone should do it, it can fix everything. The body starts to adjust, and you get less effect—but now you take a few months off, and when you return, the training effect happens again. The vast multitudes of “personal trainers” working in the field don’t have the scholastic background, and instead rely on their own experience as a guide. They’ve seen results with themselves and their clients, and thus they know what works. And anybody doing anything else is an idiot.

Sean, at least, had not only walked the walk, and competed, but had also studied. He’d done his undergrad at Cortland State in New York, a school with one of the top physical education programs in the country. Sean was a good athlete who had been invited to two different pro football free agent minicamps, by the Jets and the Panthers, but he’d gotten injured both times. He’d come to Long Beach for grad school in biomechanics.

“I didn’t graduate,” he said. “I did all my coursework but decided to leave school for my training. I regret it, but I had to create the right environment for myself. Comfort is the killer of will,” he said, deadly serious. “I had to create a Soviet Union for myself.”

Sean is a tough guy, and he had lived in the gym or in his car in order to train. He’d been homeless to train. He often launched into one of his favorite rants: how a totalitarian state is better for sports science than a democracy. He lamented the lack of money in the United States for weight lifting. In other countries, countries without football, weight lifters are rock stars. But it’s not just the professional coaches and athletes; it’s the control. In Sean’s mind, all of the best sports science, the longitudinal, twenty-to-thirty-year studies, came out of the USSR. Under totalitarianism, coaches could control all the variables. Athletes were fed the same thing, experimented on in the same way, with the same drugs.

“And then there’s talent recognition: in China, once a kid is picked for their sport, they live in a dormitory and go home twice a year to see their parents.” Sean shook his head in wonderment at how great a system that was.

“Weight lifting is interesting because it’s so controlled, and so specific. The weight of the bar is the weight of the bar; everything is measurable,” Sean mused.

This brings me to the other really interesting thing about the experience of training with Sean: what I call the tyranny of weight. You have to lift the right way. If you don’t, if your form is off, if you aren’t efficient, then you won’t be able to make the lift. You won’t lift as much as you’re capable of. The fist of the weight, pressing down on you, forces you into the correct position. When you squat with the weight overhead, if you have bad form, or bad shoulder mobility and can’t flex enough, you won’t be able to do it and you’ll fall ass over teakettle—which I did. Often. Olympic weights are made so that they can be dropped. The weights crash, but you don’t get hurt. The weight is unequivocal. There is no gray area, just a yes or a no. Weight lifting as a sport is intensely limited, the variables are closed, and there’s a long history of these fixed pieces—the most efficient methods are known, refined, perfected. Nobody’s going to come along, start doing things totally differently, and win all the medals, like when Dick Fosbury introduced the Fosbury flop to the high jump.

When the form is right, the weight seems much less. Sometimes I’d do an overhead squat with my shoulders in the right position, and the weight I’d been struggling with suddenly felt like nothing. When the snatch went right, when it flowed, the weight seemed 30 percent lighter. It just felt good and rose easily.

Sean is drawn to this purity. There’s no judgment, no aesthetic component, just the simple question: did you lift the weight? There is a terrible exactitude to that judgment. To get down and sacrifice at that altar requires a strange meshing of personality and circumstance. It sort of explains the dichotomy of Sean, who looks like a sloppy bum but speaks with precision and watches with a sharp eye to make razor-thin adjustments. “If the lift is off by two millimeters, it will fail,” he says.

—

“All this is well and good,” you might say, “but I don’t have an Olympic trainer, and besides, I’m not going to spend months learning the snatch or the clean. What about sustainability?”

I’m thirty-six years old myself, and I don’t have the time to drive to Sean’s gym four days a week. I don’t have a set of Olympic weights in my garage, although I’d like one. Sean told me a basic level of strength that remains an excellent goal: be able to squat twice your body weight. I found myself much stronger with the ability to brace and set my core, and it even translated into very explosive movements, like hitting a heavy bag. There is a definite health value to learning how to properly lift heavy things.

A very wise boxing trainer once told me, “Get strong doing what you’re doing.” He wasn’t a big fan of lifting weights. A lot of rock climbers will say that the only way to get in shape for climbing is to climb. What does that mean for the end of the world? Well, we already talked about what cardio means: sprints. A vast majority of adults lose contact with the physical, and even those who run rarely sprint. But what are you going to do when you’re pursued by zombies? Run sprints now, so that if you ever really need to, you won’t blow out a knee in your first three steps.

When it comes to fitness, we’re all an experiment of one. There’s no “Six-Minute Abs” for the apocalypse.

It’s in vogue for trainers today to pooh-pooh running. Everybody is doing the Tabata protocol and CrossFit. Long runs are out of fashion as a method for exercise. I’ve had a multitude of trainers tell me how stupid distance running is. Sure, I get it; distance running doesn’t work the anaerobic systems. “You have to be fit to run, you don’t run to get fit,” a trainer told me. Long-distance runs only hurt you, they break down the body, and you can get a “better” workout from a nasty set of sprints that tax your nervous system as well.

But read Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall, and see if you change your mind. The book explodes the myths and mistakes of running, and perhaps the most interesting is the evolutionary component. I tracked down one of McDougall’s sources, Daniel Lieberman, a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard.

“There are archeological sites in Africa with animals that were clearly hunted that are two million years old. So, we’ve been hunting for a long time. Yet putting a stone on the end of a stick is only three hundred thousand years old,” Professor Lieberman told me.

You see the issue here? How was all that hunting getting done? As Lieberman asks in his book The Evolution of the Human Head, “How could small, weaponless hominids hunt or scavenge effectively? Both tasks are, by nature, dangerous, difficult and highly competitive. Meat is an ephemeral, highly valued resource.”

All the adaptive features of the hominids that became Homo sapiens lead in the direction of distance running. The upright posture, the bipedal gait, the head and neck configuration, and above all the ability to sweat and dump heat meant that these hominids were gaining an advantage when they gave up other traits. Because of the ability to regulate temperature, they could hunt during the hottest part of the day.

Professors Lieberman and Dennis Bramble, of the University of Utah, published a paper in 2004 introducing what has since become the more or less accepted theory—namely, that running and the “persistence hunt” were a critical part of our evolutionary history. The Kalahari Bushmen have been documented doing the persistence hunt. You don’t outrun the antelope—you run it to earth. The antelope can outsprint you, but you make it sprint, and make it sprint again, and after hours of relentless pursuit, the antelope overheats. Lieberman’s book explains that

eventually, usually within 10–15 km, the animal collapses from hyperthermia (Liebenberg, 2006). The basis for this kind of hunting lies in human endurance capabilities, which exceed those of other mammals, especially in the heat. Reasonable fit humans are unique in being able to run 10–20 km or more in hot conditions at speeds (2.5–6 m/sec) that exceed the trot-gallop transitions of most quadrupeds (Bramble and Lieberman, 2004). Because quadrupeds, including hyenas and dogs, cannot simultaneously gallop and pant (Bramble and Jenkins, 1993), a human hunter armed with nothing more lethal than a club or untipped spear can safely run a large mammal such as a kudu into hyperthermia by chasing the prey above its trot-gallop transition speed.

“When we published that paper in 2004, everyone thought we were nutcases,” said Professor Lieberman. But when I spoke to him, it had been seven years and not a single rebuttal had been published. The paper was now widely cited, and people were supporting it with other papers.

Watch the incredible variety of body types that participate in a marathon. How many hundreds of thousands, nay, millions, run a marathon every year? How many people run ultramarathons, once thought to be in the realm of the impossible? McDougall mentions Arizona’s annual fifty-mile Man Against Horse Race, where at short distances the horses kick ass, but later on humans start to close the gap. In 2011 the fastest man ran 7:33 and the fastest horse ran 6:45. McDougall’s argument is persuasive: running is our heritage and we were born to do it.

I hadn’t been distance running in years, but as I took back to it, I felt how natural it could be—how healthy, how pure. Running in some way completes us as animals, and the conditioning from long runs is incredibly healthy for a thousand reasons, including the core work and the overall body tension, not to mention the fresh air.

I thought about the training I had planned. Hunting and hiking in the mountains of Colorado were going to require endurance. Moving to cover while shooting guns in the heat of Alabama was sure to require quickness and deftness, at first. But then as the days wore on, surely endurance would once again be the premium. Survival will force you into a shape, if you live long enough. If endurance is always the premium, shouldn’t we all be doing long runs and training for triathlons?

Maybe. Being fit for the apocalypse is about surviving not only that first week but those first twenty-four hours, or the first fifteen seconds. You might need that power, that burst to get up onto the roof, to pull that beam off your friend. In the weeks that follow, your body will start to adapt to your new environment, whether it be walking all day to scavenge in an urban wasteland, hunting wild pigs with a spear, or sprinting from zombies.

Survival—passing the test—is going to overwhelmingly come down to mental abilities, but the mental is inextricable from the physical. Stay in shape for the cognitive benefits, and get your rest.

You’re going to need it.

—

I grab the rubble and instantly set my core, concentrate on my Valsalva breathing, and Kegel before I explode, legs straining. The massive slab doesn’t shift. It’s immovable. It’s got to be tons.

“Honey, get us out of here . . .” I hear faintly from inside the crushed car, and my son starts to cry.

My hands uncurl off the concrete slab, white with strain, torn and bleeding. That ain’t gonna do it. I look around. I can feel black panic bubbling up inside me. I resist the urge to throw myself at the rubble and blindly dig. I look up, and I swear that tractor-trailer sways.

I hear a distant rumble, thunder that doesn’t stop. An aftershock is on the way. I’ve got a few seconds to get them out. I can feel my heart thundering, and I breathe. In, one-two-three-four, hold, out, one-two-three-four. Now think.

A lever. Give me a long enough lever, and I can move the world. I cast through the rubble, and then I get my first break of the day—a long, thick piece of rebar has snapped loose. I snatch it up, leap on top of the car, and set it deep in the crevasse. It slides in with a steely ring. I can hear the rumble louder now, the wave approaching. I can feel that tractor-trailer overhead, shifting.

“Hold tight, honey!” I yell. I coil in, wind myself in over the bar, set my legs and my whole body, clamp it all down, and then explode against the lever. This is it, this is the one. I can feel, for a second, that I’m stronger than I’ve ever been.

It gives . . . first a fraction, then an inch, and then, as the ground begins to sway, the concrete slab wobbles like a top, a massive, multiton top, and I bound clear as it comes down. The rebar clatters to the ground. Dust fills my eyes.

Just the car door now, smashed and angled, but it gives way, and I hear the cracking from above. I plunge into the car, grab them both, and explode backward, ripping them out, their eyes wide, lurching and lunging to safety as the world fills up with noise.