T-Minus 14 years
Sipping black coffee, I trudged through early morning snow on my way to my 8:00 am Physics Lab. My stomach growled.
“Hunger is the feeling of Skinny. You love this feeling.” I whispered it aloud.
It quickly became a mantra. I would repeat it hundreds of times over the next decade.
Day 147
I became addicted to the feeling of being without oxygen. It is a euphoria, only experienced when one pushes past the limits of what seems humanly possible. Everything goes numb. You lift out of your body. Your mind goes to a still place. You want to give up, your body convulses, but your mind pays no heed. In this state, you learn who is boss. You learn that your mind can and will override your body, if you train it.
I was feeling that familiar high the first time I forced myself to blackout. It felt like refusing food when I was starving. It felt like stepping on the scale and seeing a lower number. It felt like putting on clothes that had become too big on me.
I could feel the blackout approaching before it actually hit. There was a moment in which I chose to move toward it rather than away from it. Feeling my body slipping away, I embraced the fear of what might come next. I have no idea for how long I was out, but my guess is only a few seconds. When I came back, the first thing I noticed was vibration. The entire universe was vibrating. My ears were ringing and my surroundings were in black and white. Slowly, the ringing stopped, color returned and the vibrations around me stilled. But my body still buzzed. Nearly three minutes elapsed before I was even aware that I could move again.
Breath-holding became a regular part of my big wave training. Molding my mind and body into that of a big wave surfer became an obsession. Up until that point in Mexico, I paid nearly zero attention to nutrition, I had finally fired the food police, and it felt amazing. I was eating cereal for two meals a day and snacking on packages of cookies in between. Because carbs had been totally off limits for years, it now felt amazing not to give a crap. Some days, I ate four bowls of cereal for breakfast and felt absolutely no guilt. Eating without guilt was so fun. I could have ice cream at any time of the day, twice a day if I wanted. It was like going off to college for the first time after having lived under my parents’ strict rules. It was like never having a curfew. It was like being old enough to get into the club. It was like sex after marriage; guilt-free. Yes, I was definitely a little flabby, but my surfing kept me healthy and I really didn’t care about ten to fifteen pounds of extra fat if it meant I didn’t need to think about food. Men didn’t seem to care, and if they did, screw ‘em! With all the male attention I could handle from the machismo Latino culture, I didn’t have to think twice about slathering a little peanut butter on my gluten-filled toast. For the first time in my life, I was confident in my own skin.
Something started to shift when I owned the fact that I could indeed surf bigger waves if I wanted to. I started noticing that, after a heavy meal, I felt slow and sluggish; it affected my workout motivation. There was no room for slow and sluggish when dropping in on a twenty foot wave. For the first time in my life, I wanted to eat more fresh and living food. And it had nothing to do with the way I looked in a bathing suit. I started looking at cookies and sweets as roadblocks to big wave surfing. I lost the taste for them. Never, ever, ever in my life had I looked at a cookie and not wanted it. But, little by little, willpower was being replaced with want-power.
I had to deal with fears I didn’t even know I had. I kept getting myself in perfect position for a nice wave, but fear would block me at the last second. Fear can prevent you from taking the last stroke, and you miss the wave altogether. But after the commitment has been made it can be worse to back out. Fear can make you second guess your skill, and give you the worst beat down of your life.
When you are taking a wave, there is a moment in which you must commit 100%. There is a point of no return. If you are not beyond certain that you are going to take this wave, then you will do something to prevent yourself from going for it. For me, that moment of self-sabotage is when I look over my shoulder to see if anyone else is going deeper. That one look is all it takes to slow my paddle speed by a split second and prevent me from getting the wave. It is an excuse. It is a reason to not pull the trigger. In big wave surfing, the consequences of this minute pause can be fatal. If the surfer backs off just a split second too late, the wave picks her up and throws her over the lip into the worst possible position. The hapless surfer enters “The Impact Zone”, where waves crash like bombs. And even if you do pull off early, the rest of the line up gets pissed at you for wasting a wave.
So, I decided to go hunting for fear, any place I could find it. To muster courage in situations with big consequences for messing up, I felt I most certainly needed to master myself in matters of little consequence.
I hated fish. I once threw up after taking a big bite of clam chowder which I mistook for corn chowder. The truth is that I feared fish. I didn’t grow up eating much of it, and thought it was pretty weird.
I had already encountered “pescado entero” or whole fish. A fish, fried in oil, with nothing but the guts removed, served on a plate with the head and tail still intact. I was shocked when a head appeared on my plate, eyeballs gazing up at me in silent accusation. I was further shocked when I later discovered that the head, brain and eyeballs were considered the best part of the fish, traditionally reserved for the head of the household.
“Just eat it. Eat one eye. What’s it going to hurt?” The guy at my table pushed the fish head toward me.
“No way! I’ve had enough to eat. What’s it going to get me?” I challenged.
He replied simply. “Balls.”
He had a point. I used my fingers to scoop out an eye. I chewed exactly once. It didn’t pop as much as I expected it to. But neither did I. Something clicked. If I wanted to do scary stuff that could kill me, I needed mental strength. Over the next few weeks, pig brains, bovine testicles, raw reptile eggs and grasshoppers would become part of my big wave training program.
Crunching on grasshoppers or holding my breath until I passed out was one thing. Getting pitched over the lip of a wave as big as a house with enough force to break my back was another. But surfers did it, all the time. It was doable and I knew it. People take wipeouts, big, gnarly, heavy wipeouts, and they survive them without injury. I knew what I had to do, I had to take some of those wipeouts.
It all started innocently enough, the slipping-back into control mode. I wanted to surf better, so I began training harder. Little by little, want-power reverted into a familiar control high.
I started running sprints on the beach. I hate running on soft sand. I also hate sprinting. To make it worse, I would sprint and then hold my breath at the end of the sprint while I continued to walk, simulating riding a wave and taking a big wipeout. My body would feel the most intense discomfort of my life during these breath-holding bouts. It was as if my cells were shutting down. Nothing but pure big wave lust drove my movement. Lactic acid filled every muscle, and I felt as if I was being burned at the stake. Rest. Breathe. Repeat. I have put myself through some grueling workouts, but nothing comes close to this type of training.
“Hunger is the feeling of being Skinny” got replaced with a subconscious mantra, “Choking for air is the feeling of surfing big waves”
In the past, my motivation for completing an awful workout had always been how I would look when it was over. I would imagine myself feeling confident as I strolled the beach in my bikini. Now, for the first time ever, I pushed my body to its limit for reasons that had nothing to do with aesthetics. I felt proud of myself for this. Instead, I imagined myself getting held down by wave after wave, effortlessly getting myself to safety with the calm of a warrior.
But to be honest, I’d also imagine seeing myself in an epic photo, surfing a massive wave. My motivation was mostly intrinsic. I wanted to see what I was capable of at the edge of human existence. But that element of validating myself as a human by my performance had not yet been smashed within me.
I quit letting myself enjoy afternoons “wasted” in hammocks with my friends. Instead, I’d go home to study surfing clips. I stopped going out dancing at night–as is popular in Puerto–so I could get to bed earlier. I began turning down invitations for dates rather than looking for them. And, to be honest, I grew quite lonely. But I was satisfied with the trade-off.
I controlled as many variables as I could. My fitness was on point. I was running, doing yoga, bodyweight exercises and surfing everyday. My breathwork was superb. My confidence was abundant. But I still lacked one thing: actual skill on a surfboard. So, I set out to control that factor as well. The words of my high school basketball coach rang in my ears: “If you want to get good at shooting free throws, you have to shoot a lot of free throws.” I wanted to get good at surfing. I needed to surf a lot of waves.
__________
*some names have been changed to protect privacy
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