Health Beyond Civilization

Having established a certain degree of grounding in our experience of our own health, it’s worth it to start exploring goals.

I’d like to set the bar sky-high by looking at a few accounts of, for lack of a better term, superhuman feats.

Ernest Thompson Seton, in Gospel of the Redman, wrote,

The most famous runner of ancient Greece was Pheidippides, whose record run from Athens to Sparta was 140 miles in 36 hours. Among our Indians, such a feat would have been considered very second-rate. In 1882, at Fort Ellice, I saw a young Cree who, on foot, had just brought in despatches from Fort Qu’Appelle (125 miles away) in 25 hours. It created almost no comment. I heard little from the traders but cool remarks like, “A good boy”, “pretty good run”. It was obviously a very usual exploit, among Indians.

The two Indian runners, Thomas Zafiro and Leonicio San Miguel, ran 62 1/2 miles, i.e. from Pachuca to Mexico City, in 9 hours, 37 minutes, November 8, 1926, according to the El Paso Times, February 14, 1932. This was 9 1/4 minutes to the mile.

The Zunis have a race called, “Kicked Stick.” In this, the contestants each kick a stick before them as they run. Dr. F. W. Hodge tells me that there is a record of 20 miles covered in 2 hours by one of the kickers.

The Tarahumare mail carrier runs 70 miles a day, every day in the week, carrying a heavy mailbag, and he doesn’t know that he is doing an exploit. In addition, we are told: “The Tarahumare mail carrier from Chihuahua to Batopiles, Mexico, runs regularly more than 500 miles a week; a Hopi messenger has been known to run 120 miles in 15 hours.”

The Arizona Indians are known to run down deer by sheer endurance, and every student of Southwestern history will remember that Coronado’s mounted men were unable to overtake the natives when in the hill country, such was their speed and activity on foot.

Shaolin kung fu master Wong Kiew Kit recalls, in The Complete Book of Shaolin,

My master lived near a river when he was a small boy. One day he saw an old man literally run across the river which he knew was deep. He told me he actually pinched himself to ascertain he was not dreaming. Even at that early age, my master knew he witnessed a very advanced kind of qing gong or the art of lightness called “Running on Water as if on Land.” For many months he waited for the old man to appear again, but to no avail. Understandably, most people would not believe it is possible to run on water unless they have seen it with their own eyes.

Natural vision pioneer Dr. William Bates had an interesting case that he recounts in Perfect Sight Without Glasses:

The extraordinary memory of primitive people has been attributed to the fact that owing to the absence of any convenient means of making written records they had to depend upon their memories, which were strengthened accordingly; but in view of the known facts about the relation of memory to eyesight it is more reasonable to suppose that the retentive memory of primitive man was due to the same cause as his keen vision, namely, a mind at rest.

The primitive memory as well as primitive keenness of vision, has been found among civilized people; and if the necessary tests had been made it would doubtless have been found that they always occur together, as they did in a case which recently came under my observation. The subject was a child of ten with such marvelous eyesight that she could see the moons of Jupiter with the naked eye, a fact which was demonstrated by her drawing a diagram of these satellites which exactly corresponded to the diagrams made by persons who had used a telescope. Her memory was equally remarkable. She could recite the whole content of a book after reading it, as Lord Macaulay is said to have done, and she learned more Latin in a few days without a teacher than her sister, who had six diopters of myopia, had been able to do in several years. She remembered five years afterward what she ate at a restaurant, she recalled the name of the waiter, the number of the building and the street in which it stood. She also remembered what she wore on this occasion and what every one else in the party wore. The same was true of every other event which had awakened her interest in any way, and it was a favorite amusement in her family to ask her what the menu had been and what people had worn on particular occasions.

Joe Greenstein, one of the last traveling “strongmen” of the early 20th century, was able to do some amazing things, many of them well-documented.

Unlike most strongmen, Joe was not large — Standing at 5′5″ and weighing in at 140 pounds, Joe Greenstein dubbed himself “The Mighty Atom” and eventually became one of the 20th century’s most well-known strongmen. He captivated audiences all over the country.

His feats included:

• Driving 20 penny nails through a 2-1/2 inch board with his bare hands
• Lying on a bed of nails while supporting a 14-man band on his chest
• Separating a car tire from its rim with nothing but his bare hands
• Breaking as many as three chains by expanding his chest
• Bending iron bars by holding one end with his teeth and the other end held fixed in a vise
• Bending steel bars, spikes and horse shoes with his hands
• Biting nails or chains in half with his teeth (he could also perform this feat with a quarter)
• Resisting (or pulling) vehicles (buses, plains, automobiles) with his hair

In the simplest of terms, I just want to illustrate with these few examples that I believe that human potential — specifically, in the context of this website, the potential of our bodies to perform magnificent feats — has hardly been tapped. There are many more stories. Tom Brown tells a story about his mentor Stalking Wolf being able to swim upstream as if it were nothing, and immersing in ice water with no trouble whatsoever. Some Tibetan monks practice tummo, an art which allows them to sit in freezing cold and generate enough heat to dry soaking wet towels (a feat which has been documented in the laboratory). There are old kung fu myths about being masters able to catch darts or arrows that were fired at their backs. Saint Joseph of Copertino was reputedly able to actually fly.

Of course, some of these are myths and legends. And while others may have indeed been true, let’s keep in mind that, amazing as it might be to be able to run across water, a more relevant skill these days is to pay off thousands of dollars of debt while feeding the kids and keeping your sanity!

Nonetheless, the point that I want to make is that we are not, and should not, be bounded by preconceived notions or rules regarding our own health or fitness or any physical or mental capabilities. Just as we have been blinded to the many destructive aspects of our own society, I suggest that we’ve been blinded to our own capacity for achievement.

Unfortunately, if it is possible to run hundreds of miles in days without tiring, such methods are either lost or inaccessible to the general public. So we start where we are, and work slowly toward whatever goal we set, and continue to look for ways we can step outside the boundaries of what others, or we ourselves, tell us we can do.

But at any rate, we have to stand before we can walk, walk before we can run, run before we can do such marathons!

One last note: Despite the tone of this post, in my opinion setting high goals for the sake of those goals is completely insufficient. Obsession with performance, in whatever way, will ultimately prove to be detrimental to the human spirit. Pursuing a balanced path is a must and, I imagine, a prerequisite. If you can break nails with your bare hands but you use them to beat your children or terrorize your neighbors, then you have not advanced the human race at all.