Laird Hamilton and Love Handles

I stand in front of the bathroom mirror reflecting on how the state of my abs are nowhere near the state of surf legend Laird Hamilton’s. The almost comical tan lines created by my PFD (personal floatation device) on my torso create the impression that I’m wearing a baby carrier strapped to my chest everytime I go outside in the sunlight without my shirt on. A particularly unflattering feature of where my epidermis is vitamin D deficient, is the break that hits exactly where it can most accentuate the small, but still existing, love handles that I can never seem to be rid of entirely.

Somewhere down near one of my elbows, I can feel tendons continue to vibrate and hum with inflammation. On the opposite side of my body, the small muscles over my ribs ache a little as I brush my teeth. The muscles beneath both of my shoulder blades throb dully as I lean over to spit.

My eyes lock with their reflection and then survey the wrinkled white patches around them that stand in stark contrast to the rest of my tanned face. One of my shoulders sends a mild pang down my arm and I sense how fatigued my lower calf muscle are.

To the extent that my life actually allows for it, during the past few years, the sport of paddleboarding has become a way of life, While it is a fun way for some people to spend the occasional hot summer day on a placid lake, for me it is something that frequently takes on the dullness of daily routine.

Checking equipment.

Loading the board onto the rack on my rig.

Packing a change of clothes and bottles of water.

Driving to a body of water instead of hitting the gym after work.

Trying not to forget something to snack on for after the workout.

But, with every drive home, there’s always a measure of reward — even on the crappiest of days. Take the last week I spent on the water at a nearby reservoir lake on my most challenging board — a twenty-six inch wide featherlight carbon fiber race hybrid. The first day featured fifteen mile an hour winds, two foot waves and tons of motorboat wake. The second day was a repeat except the winds were more on the magnitude of twenty miles an hour with a relentless chop that generated waves with less than a second between. The day after that was a little better, but I still managed to break my record for number of times falling off my board.

Challenging? Yes. Fun? Not particularly. In really windy chop, my focus becomes unbalanced as I spend more of it simply trying to stay on my board and less on my stroke technique. This is essentially the opposite of how most paddlers exert their concentration.

The forward stroke. The foundation of all that is paddleboarding. A topic of obsession. The thing most people who attempt to paddleboard get wrong. A minor discipline in of itself that seems nearly impossible to perfect.

On paper, the forward stroke is pretty simple and is broken into three basic steps: the catch, power phase, recovery. In between those three things are a million nuances and dozens of core fundamentals. When done correctly, things have a way of clicking and you never forget it. The rest of the time is an exercise in frustration or simply paddling without realizing what you’re missing out on.

Part of what you miss out on is a sore body. The forward stroke is essentially an exercise in leveraging your torso, or core, while balancing on something that is floating on water. Most people’s instinct is to do what most sports require of us, which is using our legs and and arms. By nature of holding a paddle in your hands, you are safe to assume that pulling the paddle through the water with your arms is what you should be doing. This is precisely why a proper forward stroke becomes a point of obsession.

You don’t pull with your arms. You pull with your body.

You don’t pull with your arms. You pull with your body. Your arms are merely levers attached to your body. While the paddle does technically move through the water, it is primarily a static position that your body pulls itself up toward. So working back through the three seemingly simple steps of the forward stroke, the catch is really the act of sticking or planting the blade of the paddle into the water as far forward as you can actually pull — also referred to as the reach. The reach is achieved in part by bending at the hips and knees, allowing your torso to fall forward. While this is happening, your lower arm needs to be as straight as possible while your upper arm helps drive the paddle down and perpendicular to the front of the board. Did I mention “stacking your shoulders” and keeping your head looking forward while narrowing the space between your feet and keeping them pointed forward as well? When a blade is properly planted, in the words of elite paddler John Puakea, it feels like mud, like you just dropped into concrete. There should be minimal splash, no slapping noise, just a near silent slip into the water that feels like you just drove a shovel into dirt. That’s step one in something you’ll typically do between thirty to forty times a minute.

The power phase is next and this is where most people screw up, and most paddlers get downright neurotic. The paddle is planted and “loaded” with water pressure working against the blade — energy ready to be released. The instinct, as I mentioned, is to pull with the arms. However, what needs to happen is to treat that planted blade like a pole set in concrete and pull your body up to it. Water, being that near mystical element, will allow your paddle to move back toward you as pull yourself forward, so it’s visually deceptive. Pulling yourself forward brings you back to an upright standing position, using your legs and hips to thrust your momentum forward.

Now, you can relax — for approximately one or two seconds.

On the recovery, you still have things to think about.

Feathering the blade parallel with the water.

Keeping your head and shoulders level.

Making sure that as you stand, the blade of the paddle lifts and exits the water at or slightly behind your feet.

Breathing.

Now, as mentioned, repeat the whole cycle roughly thirty times a minute on average. Forty to fifty times if you’re in a race. When done properly, the muscles in your quads, glutes, abs, traps, and delts will feel it.

When Laird Hamilton became the father of modern paddleboarding by hopping on a tandem longboard and grabbing a canoe paddle, he probably wasn’t thinking about any of these things. In fact, he probably didn’t realize that his simple act, while deliberate, would give rise to what would become to water what bicycles are to land recreation. Inside of a decade, hundreds of individuals have evolved the sport into a rapidly growing and splitting tree that is easily as diversified as cycling. Like cycling, each specialized branch has its champions and experts, with very few mastering them all. The simple fact is, Laird birthed a sport that quickly outstripped even his own god-like abilities.

That’s a big part of the human condition — there’s always going to be someone, before, during or after your time, who is better than you at whatever it is you do. For all we know, the greatest surfer may have come and gone a hundred years before the Spanish even scouted the Pacific.

Or he may have caught his first wave this morning.

It doesn’t really matter. The only thing anyone, including yourself, is going to remember about the things you do is how you did them. How much effort you put into it. How dedicated you were to the things you enjoyed doing, even if it didn’t come easily for you. Lots of talented people don’t enjoy the things they’re talented at, but because of that talent, they’ll usually be better at it than the person who loves the same activity but has to work extremely hard to get it right. That’s just life. Believe me, it’s frustrating to be a deeply focused middle-aged man who finds himself pushed to his limits just to keep pace with a young athlete using poor technique. The point then, is to be out there pushing yourself to the best of your ability.Unloading my board with the efficiency of daily routine and carrying my board to some local body of water, I have no delusions of paddle glory. I feel amazing — better than any sport I’ve pursued has ever made me feel. Many mornings begin with waking up while reliving or envisioning being on the water. Nothing major or spectacular, maybe only surf small enough for kids to play in, maybe just the perfect forward stroke on placid water. The sensation of the glide — that almost ethereal rush of sky-reflecting mercury sliding under your feet. In that moment, I’m experiencing the same thing Laird Hamilton or any other great waterman has. Tan-lined love handles and inflamed tendons be damned; I’m walking on water.