Wipeouts are an inevitable part of surfing. It is never a question of IF. It is a question of WHEN.
The other day I went to surf a remote little reef with a couple of friends. One is a photographer and took some nice pics. There were some sketchy sections and wipeouts were definitely going to happen for me that day, particularly as I was experimenting with some new boards that most consider a fair bit too small for me. I am over 6 foot and the boards were 5′6″ and 5′8″. I still maintain that there is no relation between surfer height and board length. This tends to shock some and contradict popular local opinion but this does not concern me. The trend at professional level is definitely to play with shorter boards and I am enjoying these boards at the moment. Period.
I do not remember the wipeout above. The one below I do remember and it hurt a bit. I fell something like this on a much smaller wave a couple of years ago and apparently cracked a few ribs. A little piece about my recovery and prevention ideas can be found here.
While I have had a long interest in yoga I did not practice regularly enough until about a year ago. It was only when I started lessons with Hatha yoga teacher Eve Cunard that I fell in love with almost daily practice. She is a very sensitive, gentle, fun, profound and inspiring teacher and I highly recommend her to anyone who wants to get into pure and wonderful yoga.
Aside from the regular practice, yoga awareness has infected my mind and body in everyday living. The mental and physical benefits have been profound for me. There is a calm and relaxed confident control that comes easily with practice. Naturally this has great benefits for surfing where thrill seeking and adrenaline rush need to be balanced with a calm coloured survival instinct. I think surfers want and need this balance. We are risk takers, there is no doubt about that. But we don’t want to get ourselves injured. And if and when we are injured we want to recover as quickly and painlessly as possible.
At the extreme of our sport is Big Wave Surfing. Sometimes I say that this is another sport entirely. There is a huge gap between what big wave surfers do and what the average surfer does. The differences in training and preparation are not that different at the elite level but there still are some differences there. The main difference is that almost all big wave surfers train like elite athletes. Regular surfers, even professionals, often do not.
Hawaiian Mark Foo once said, “If you want the ultimate thrill you have to be prepared to pay the ultimate price.” A while after this he took a wipeout and Mavericks and was never seen again. But big wave surfers generally do survive.
A lot of them credit yoga for their survival and I would estimate that most practice some form of yoga. Former world champion and Pipeline legend Tom Carrol said that “yoga helps me find my centre in the middle of chaos.” I don’t agree with his choice of the word “chaos” but I do agree with everything else about this statement. His surfing performance well into his late 40’s is immensely inspiring. He is dedicated to regular yoga practice.
I knew the wave below was going to pitch as I paddled for it so I was hoping to get in fast and get straight into the barrel. But I ended up stuck at the top after I stood up. The bottom suddenly just dropped out of the thing and I free fell into it. I hit the water pretty hard and it was quite painful. I was hoping to avoid all the sensations of the cracked rib thing as this plagued me for more than a year and just kept coming back. The impact was painful but fortunately there was only some minor muscle tweaking in the evening and by the following morning I was fine - no sign that it had even happened. Had I taken this wipeout 2 years ago I reckon I would have ended up in hospital and unable to walk with broken ribs. For me there are a few reasons for how things have changed:
1. my body has better adjusted to regular training and recovery
2. experience in wiping out has taught me to fall in relaxed ways without too much stretched extension or tension
3. regular yoga has helped my muscles and internal organs to relax in such situations
4. yoga has helped me to accept my situation in the moment, simply observe it, calm my mind and let go with a casual breath before impact
There are many schools of thought ranging across disciplines both practical and theoretical that claim that injuries are largely psychological, that they start and end in the mind. What they leave on the body is merely a trace. The more I live and learn the more I am tempted to agree with this.
Have fun surfing and wiping out!
