The blissful joys of hypoxia and the realisation that Twinks raised on surf can roll with Bears! “If I could survive the sea, there was no human that I could not deal with because no man can bring the same level of panic and discomfort as the ocean!”

I think of these words every time a two-fifty pounder is grinding his knee into my solar plexus and my eyes start to leak.

There’s a moment when life slips away, when you teeter on the edge of the abyss, and as that sweetest sap serotonin floods the brain, where the divine is revealed. 

Pain, depression, all the wrongs of your life evaporate as paradise unfolds before you. 

I frolic in a meadow with my children back at an age when they still wanted to hang out with me.

Look over there, a happy chimpanzee in a t-shirt and diaper bounces up and down! A pitcher filled with freshly squeezed lemonade sits on a small wooden table! A chihuahua with patches of fur missing dances on her hind legs! The setting sun throws a golden glow over the tableau! 

I’m here, paradise, so take me God. 

Then, your legs are getting shaken, a couple of slaps paint your face and you realise that ten seconds ago your head was wrapped in the flexed gastrocnemius muscles of a man whom you’d only just met. 

Getting choked in a jiujitsu class is the closest you’ll get to drowning in a controlled environment and it is, I suspect, one of the reasons, although not the only one, why so many surfers are driven to the sport. 

A little over a year ago, I signed up for unlimited classes at a flashy joint down in Maroubra, Sydney (click here to join, tell ‘em I sent ya, maybe I’ll get a cut. You can also click, here, to listen to a jiujitsu podcast I do to pay for training.)

The play was I’d get in there, get dirty, report back if it improved my surfing and if there was a connection between the two sports. 

It was a nexus I’d examine attentively. 

I began by watching the documentary Choke about Rickson Gracie, a surfer, and son of the creator of Brazilian Jiutjisu Hélio Gracie, and who was earning a million bucks per MMA fight twenty years ago. 

A formidable creature. 

My new crush Peter Maguire ghost wrote Rickson’s book, Breathe, and, in an earlier interview for The Surfer’s Journal, snatched this quote. 

“Surfing taught me, probably more than anything else, how to deal with the infinite power of things that are beyond our control,” Rickson said. “All of the emotional, physical, and spiritual elements I needed to surf big waves also applied to fighting. If I could survive the sea, there was no human that I could not deal with because no man can bring the same level of panic and discomfort as the ocean. With fighting I am only fighting another man. I only have to be precise, smart, and at some point, impose my will on him.”

I think of it every time a two-fifty pounder is grinding his knee into my solar plexus. 

No…man…can…bring…same…level…of…panic.

Breathe, just breathe. 

Now, jiujitsu, like surf, don’t come easy. 

You start off as a white belt and via a grading system that is casually observational rather than formal, at least where I roll, you gather stripes as you improve in your live sparring. 

Don’t tap so much? Escape the clutches of a  bear? Finish your own submission? Stripe. 

A stripe is a piece of tape that is wrapped around the black end of your belt. Four stripes and you’re one step away from an upgrade. White to blue, blue to purple, purple to brown, brown to black. 

Train six days a week for ten years and you’re close to black. People in the biz joke about it being a more demanding course than neurosurgery. 

Like surf, I’m slow to improve despite hitting the gym six days a week.  The concepts of leverage and angles don’t come easy. 

I get tapped more than I should. 

I get pretty busted up: ears flare up from being locked in triangles and being squished into the mats and give me the appearance of a weathered elf in Christmas photos; three black eyes from accidental flying elbows and knees; I hurt my back when I don’t warm up and my fingers ache at every joint.

An eye gouge from my son puts me into the Sydney eye hospital and off the mats, and water, for three weeks. 

I feel like a machine that has slipped its cogs. 

But it’s so in my head I’m thinking armbar escapes and chokes when I surf. 

My lil WHOOP strap records it all, under a plastic sleeve on my wrist when I surf (designed by John John etc) and a neoprene bicep wrap when I roll. 

First bit of disturbing data is my lack of sleep. I figured I was hitting eight hours a night, easy. Bed at nine-ish, up at six.

Actual figures were closer to five. 

I might be in bed by nine but I’m staring at my telephone for the first 45, then maybe a book, some more phone, text a few people, asleep by midnight, apparently. 

A few nocturnal wanders, fifteen “disturbances”, bad dreams, whatever, and oowee, now I know why I don’t feel real flash some morns. 

If I want to train, I have to get off the phone, learn to treat bed for rest.

Get on it and snatch only a few hours sleep and your recovery number is going to be in the red. Bigger the stressor the less able your bod is gonna handle getting smashed.

Like this, three hours sleep and I’m at twenty-six percent. Stay it bed, it advises.

Sure, I respond.

What surprises is how much better a workout surfing is.

Easy paddle out via a channel, cruise around the lineup, trap a wave here and there, avoid a few VAL rocketships and I hit a “strain” of anywhere between ten and sixteen. 

Quick explanation: the WHOOP records strain on a scale from zero to 21 over the course of the day, zero being David Lee Scales, 21, Kai Lenny. Twenty-one re represents the max cardio load you can handle in a day. The WHOOP doesn’t measure miles, steps, so much as how your body is responding when you do it. 

After one hour of jiujitsu sparring where I think my heart is gonna explode, I’m swimming in sweat, eyes are bulging, veins appear on the surface of my legs and arms, and I’m lucky to score an eight.  

A victory for surf. 

And you don’t get injured. 

Next week: Finding common ground, even empathy, with, for, VALS!