What Doesn't Kill Us

by Scott Carney

Of the four rooms on the second floor there is only one piece of furniture: a bed with a broken spring in the middle. At its foot is the sum total of Wim’s personal wardrobe: a white plastic trash bag full of dirty clothes, a hopelessly wrinkled white sports coat, an orange swimsuit, and a few towels. The pile sits discarded on a stained brown carpet. I stare at the collection for a minute. Part of me despairs what a week in such Spartan quarters will feel like, while the other part marvels at the disjunction between the worldwide fame and riches, associated with the training empire, and the way Hof chooses to live. Wim is many things, but he is clearly not motivated by material trappings. Enahm calls up from downstairs. “I think my dad usually sleeps on the couch,” he says. “You can probably take his bed.”

Although it is late, Hof has the vitality of a man a quarter his age. We sit together on the couch and chat for several hours. In the last few years Hof went from being an unknown to a world-famous guru, and he says he is struggling to understand what it means to be an icon as well as the figurehead on the prow of a several-million-dollar-a-year business. The constant lecturing, workshops, and media appearances are not what he is built for. He’d much rather be a madman than a prophet. But with great power comes great responsibility, so Hof has to zero in on the kind of highly refined message that can captivate the largest possible audience. He tries a slogan on me; it’s just three words. “Healthy, happy, strong,” he says with pride. “I just want to keep it simple.” These, he says, are the three ingredients to a good life. Forget, for a minute, the science behind breathing and the cold, the barbaric discomfort of ice water, or how many pushups a person might do without breathing. They’re all just trappings of a larger desire to live well. From there we descend into a more detailed discussion of what it means to live a good life. Hof starts to speak quicker, like he is agitated. He begins to wave his arms in the air as if he is keeping a small insect at bay. “Society is sick,” he says. “Have you ever seen a rabbit go to a pharmacy, a hospital, or a mental asylum?” he asks rhetorically. “They don’t look for medicine, they heal themselves or die. Humans aren’t so simple; they’...

“Tomorrow you will do forty pushups,” Hof said. “If you don’t, you can leave with your money.” Hof has a way of convincing people to take him up on challenges, and, being no exception, van den Bergh agreed. And he never did get his money back. By the end of the next day he’d done more pushups than he had ever done before—not quite 40—but close enough to make him reconsider Hof’s seemingly impossible claims. A light went off in his brain. He might have even cried a little. If van den Bergh could push his body this far in a single 2-day workshop, what would happen if he did it every day? So van den Bergh dug in. He took ice baths and breathed in the mornings like his life depended on it. Starting at 6:15 a.m. he drove to a freshwater lake outside the village and walked down a small, steel ramp into the water. As he slid in up to his neck in the water he embraced the cold and felt warmth course through his body. “It was like I was connecting with something greater than myself,” he says. “Sometimes it was like I could see myself from above as if I was a spirit floating above my body in the water looking down.” After 2 months of regular practice, the pain was gone. A few months later his index finger had shrunk from the size of a plum to a manageable grapelike shape. He could flex it and hold things. His whole body started to feel new again. His morning routine became the talk of the town. A few people laughed when they heard that the 50-ish man was taking nearly naked ice bath...

The water feels good. It burns my skin and dilates my pupils. I want to stay there and enjoy it a little longer. After the first moment of shock, all the endorphins are flowing and the pleasure sets in. The thing about icy baths is that it’s only the first moments that are actually uncomfortable. But van den Bergh insists that we get out. The second time will be colder, he promises. So we rush out of the water, and then we get onto the ground and do just enough pushups to get the blood moving again. I feel my fingers come back to life. He points back to the water and says it is time to get in again. I expect it to feel something similar to the brisk cold from a few minutes earlier, but he is right. Recycling is more intense. Just as my body is beginning to relax from the pushups, the veins open again and let some blood back in. The water hits me like a bullet and I have a second adrenaline rush. I am high as a kite, but it is also harder for me to relax in the water. A stiff breeze is blowing, and I start to dread how I’ll feel when I get out. A shiver wells up from my feet to my forehead. I am out of control, but I stay in the water anyway. It’s not like it is going to kill me. After a couple minutes van den Bergh leads me out and we reclaim our garments from the pavement. “Aaah, Kilimanjaro,” he smiles. “You will think about every single breath and it will be the most beautiful time of your life.”

When I arrive at the institute, I learn that Castellani is ramping up a new project to test soldiers’ manual dexterity in cold temperatures. Long before hypothermia or frostbite sets in, a person experiences a slowdown in fine motor skills. This slowdown is one of the first signs that a person is getting cold. Loss of manual dexterity might mean that a soldier in the Arctic who is trying to change a flat tire might not be able to thread lug nuts onto the bolts. And when a vehicle is out of commission, the supply chain isn’t moving as efficiently as it should.

It turns out that just enduring the weather isn’t the quickest way to change the body so that it can withstand a new environment. Rather, the fastest way is by working hard in it—a process that is strikingly similar to the work being done both by November Project and Brian MacKenzie.

Hof lies back on one of the tables and closes his eyes. They roll back in his sockets and flutter. He turns red and when he opens his eyes he is once again bursting with energy. One of the problems with following someone with superpowers is that my body doesn’t obey the same rules of rest and recovery that his does. And now that we’re close to the summit his mind is focused only on setting a record. Everyone else is recovering and waiting for a hot lunch that we’d been told was on the way. Hof checks the time. It’s 11:40. Then he shouts, “Okay, everyone. We go in twenty minutes. We’re not on the mountain because we want to eat. We’re here to make the summit.” The message lands flat in a room full of confused faces. I’m not the only one to mutter an obscenity. Sensing insubordination, Hof revises his message 3 minutes later. “Never mind rest,” he says. “We go now and make a new record!” He launches himself out of the room and walks down the wide path between Kibo’s humble buildings and into a collection of mountain guides. Mike Nelson, the guide who helped retrieve Mallory’s effects off Everest, tries to block Hof’s path. “You can’t go now,” he tries to command Hof. But the gnome-like leader of our expedition simply brushes past him. He heads up the mountain towing two Belgian ladies who had come on the trip to enhance their corporate leadership skills. I watch the movement of his neon orange shoes from the doorway while trying to decide whether I have a duty to follow the ...

After a few years of exploring ways to use the environment to peek into the inner workings of the body, I’ve learned a thing or two about my own limits in the world. I know that every person—even people who have jellyfish spirit animals—hide vast wells of inner strength. The secret to cracking into our inner biology is as easy as leaving our comfort zones and seeking out just enough environmental stress to make us stronger. Exposure to cold helps reconfigure the cardiovascular system and combat autoimmune malfunctions. It is also a pretty darned good method for simply losing weight. These are all things that I’ve seen in myself and in hundreds of other people who have had the will to delve deeply into their own evolutionary physiologies. More profound than that, however, is the intrinsic understanding that humans are not just bodies bounded by the barrier of their skin; we are part of the environment that we inhabit.