Harsh.

Newswires are currently aflame with the news that surf movie star Simon Baker has just broken up with his girlfriend as capital punishment for her attending an “anti-vaxx” protest, or rather broke up with her a few months ago for that action.

Per, Yahoo! Australia:

Simon Baker and Laura May Gibbs have split.

A source confirmed to PEOPLE that the Mentalist actor, 52, and activewear designer, 36, “quietly parted ways” several months ago after she attended an anti-vaxx protest. Gibbs has been increasingly vocal on social media about her opposition to the COVID-19 vaccine and recent nationwide mandates for it.

On Sunday, she shared a video while attending a rally in Australia to protest vaccine mandates. The clip shows hundreds gathered and cheering with one person’s sign reading: “We stand united against ‘no jab no job’ and vaccine passports.”

Gibbs captioned the Instagram post, “Power to the people (heart emoji) (raised fist emoji).”

But whoa.

What Yahoo! meant to write was “A source confirmed to PEOPLE that star of Tim Winton’s coming-of-age surf film Breath, 52, and activewear designer, 36, ‘quietly parted ways’…” but potato potato, no?

Did you watch Breath?

I tried on an airplane, once, but became sleepy and only had the words of Derek Rielly making much fun of Tim Winton dancing in my head so didn’t take it very seriously.

I also don’t much like coming-of-age movies.

But back to Baker’s guillotine over a light difference of opinion.

Do you think fair?

Do you worry about everyone entering echo chambers?

My wife has been known to read Malcolm Gladwell but I’m not breaking up with her.

Malcolm Gladwell.

That bro properly sucks.

More as the story develops.

Trouble in the water.

The shine has not quite yet worn off surfing’s grand Olympic debut wherein, just months ago, our best and brightest paddled out off Japan’s near-perfect coast and wowed the globe with top turns, bottom turns, floaters. Surfers were made stars that day. International heroes and it was an unmitigated success with Brazil taking gold for the men’s draw and the mighty United States of America, by way of Hawaii, taking it for the women’s.

A glorious coming out and one that will reprise in Paris, by way of Teahupoo, Los Angeles and Brisbane.

Now, the Olympics is known for uniting the nations in beautiful sport, not for corruption, but a troubling rumor has emerged from the gold medal-winning United States that suggests the powerful United States Olympic Committee is currently in the process of decertifying USA Surfing as the national governing body “due ethical business practice concerns.”

BeachGrit‘s inside source says, “They sent letters out to all the Olympic athletes recently informing them.”

USA Surfing, which declares on its website, “The essential elements of character building and ethics in sports are embodied in the concept of sportsmanship and six core principles: trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, and good citizenship. The highest potential of sports is achieved when competition reflects these “six pillars of character,” is headed up by San Clemente’s Greg Cruse while Brett Simpson coaches the team.

It is unclear what the “ethical business practice concerns” could be as USA Surfing has a vast code of conduct that must be signed by parents and makes them swear “I will not force my child to participate in sports.”

Speculation, at this early stage, would be inappropriate and BeachGrit will seek to secure the athlete letter.

More as the story develops.

An riddle not even the great Richard Simmons could solve.

Physical fitness is a grand mystery, one that the greatest minds of all history have tried to unlock. What is right so to do and what is wrong? Which way do muscles, endurance, vibrancy grow and which way do they shrink? Jazzercise yay or nay? Kettlebells in or out? Crossfit up or down? The Bunyanesque thinker Richard Simmons summed it up, rightly, when saying, “The human body, and how to train it, is the universe’s singular conundrum. I’ve resigned myself not to understand but simply like myself, eat healthy and squeeze my buns. That’s my formula.”

Wise and words that I try to live by own my own fitness journey, tacking them to the cedar walls of my infrared sauna and meditating upon them while I broil internally. As you well know, I purposed a month, or such, ago to pull myself from the morass of physical, mental inertia and march toward greatness once again. To strive for an above average cutback. A solid down carve.

And, as if listening, the universe responded, gifting me, and you too if you are bold enough, a personal digital fitness and health coach.

My WHOOP strap, sleek and black, showed how far I had fallen but also how to walk then march toward that greatness. A par-for-the-course bottom turn. It measured my strain, my heart rate, told me when to sleep, how to recover.

It whispered at me while I did pushups and squats like a convict in order to improve my pop-up.

It nodded while I danced ballet in order to improve my footwork.

It taught me to run, carrying me on its nylon wings toward a 4 minute kilometer and the ability to surf for more than 30 minutes without getting tired..

I would study the WHOOP application on my telephone nightly, watching strain soar, balancing recovery, but yesterday discovered an anomaly certain to befuddle the most august fitness scholars at the most gilded institutions like 24 Hour Fitness and Gold’s Gym.

Two days of the week, Wednesday and Friday, I do not train.

Those selfsame two days of the week shoot my heart beats through minutes through the roof.

An oddity.

An enigma.

And I pondered it while meditating on Richard Simmons, broiling internally, until the universe gently sighed the answer.

Wednesday and Friday are the days I gather with four of my best friends, all fathers, and our eight children, aged four through eight, in order to teach them.

The academy was founded near the beginning of last year as the pandemic chewed through schools, sticking boys and girls in front of Zoom screens for many hours a day. We met on a sailboat in Newport Harbor, halfway between my San Diego and their Los Angeles, and cobbled together math, English, Spanish, Arabic, history, sailing, literature, how to get in a straight line and stay there. How not to be an annoying spazz.

This year it has become even more serious with fully developed curriculums, science experimentation, ship shape penmanship, much memorization, nautical navigation, etc.

It has all been a wild experiment, learning how children learn, getting them to learn, tossing Derrida out the window and sorting through phonics, establishing both discipline and esprit de corps, preserving curiosity.

Oh, but nothing causes the heart to pound whilst towering over a five-year-old who has told you that three plus three is eight for the third time in a row. Nothing causes it to almost burst through its chest cavity when a seven-year-old snitches, yet again, when he’s been told at least one-thousand times, “Where do we put tattletales? That’s right. Up the mainsail.”

But then the four-year-old remembers that Jacques Cousteau’s boat was Calypso and somehow knows he invented the SCUBA tank without being told, the eight-year-old recites a passage from Dostoyevsky with award-winning flair and all of them, together, pound a bully at a park.

Proud moments that dot days mostly on the very border of full-blown aneurysms.

Teachers are saints and would likely receive pay raises if they each wore a WHOOP strap to work each and every day.

Buy here, fifteen percent discount if you use the code BEACHGRIT at checkout.

Fifteen percent is not written %51.

"It was such a dangerous position..."

It is often said, and very often by famous podcaster Scott Bass, that “surfers are the worst” but in my experience upon this blue globe surfers are generally “pretty ok” and if in some sort of oceanic trouble “valuable assets.”

Well, the old “surfers are valuable assets” adage played out, once again, on Australia’s south east coast last weekend when a boat capsized in the surf zone off Waniora Point in Bulli. Sean Brokman, 32, was out when he saw the mess.

“A few men were holding onto the boat without life jackets and they were obviously in serious trouble,” he told Yahoo! News. He and five others paddled over, assessed the situation and realized there were more people trapped inside.

Selflessly all of them ditched their boards and began diving under.

“It was such a dangerous position. If we had been hit by a wave we could have so easily been caught under there ourselves. The visibility was poor because of all the fuel and debris in the water but by some miracle I could see an air pocket in the bow of the boat with some legs, so I just went up and plucked that guy out.”

The unconscious man was full of water and sunk immediately after being pulled out but Brokman was “somehow managed to grab him and kick our way to the surface — I don’t know how.”

Another brave surfer, Sebastian James, meanwhile freed three more trapped men all by himself.

At this point in the harrowing tale Australian lifesavers on sleds arrived and began hauling the victims to shore where emergency teams had set up CPR stations. Three had gone into cardiac arrest and were rushed to nearby hospitals while a fourth was unable to be revived but it would have been a total loss if not for the selflessness, the strength of surfers.

The best people on earth.