Surf Journalist discovers “antipatico” towards fellow surfers key to improved performance!

WHOOP leverages peer pressure to squeeze previously unheard of gains out of average shredders… 

I’m no winner, which is obvious.

The level of intensity and antipatico needed to triumph over another man, woman, non-binary fellow, business competitor, is beyond anything I’m willing to conjure. 

(Antipatico, of course, is how you feel when you see someone you dislike drowning in a river and you refuse to help even if it is a very hot day in summer and you are dreaming of having a nice swim.) 

At the beginning of the year, I began to order my life around my WHOOP strap, a digital fitness tracker that gathers multiple health metrics, monitoring heart rate variability (HRV), resting heart rate and sleep, to create a daily recovery score. WHOOP lets y’know when’s a good time to hit the water for a four-hour marathon session and when you might want to tan under an umbrella on the beach. 

All very helpful, frank advice that doesn’t care for the user’s precious feelings.

A less discussed part of WHOOP and I would suggest it’s most powerful tool is its community. You join a club –  surfing, jiujitsu, BeachGrit, Surf Splendour, running, whatevs – and you’re constantly being monitored against your peers. 

Here, I must win, even if only for an hour, for various time zones mean while I surf, others sleep, and therefore an average man, with a little effort, can triumph over thousand of other surfers or stranglers or joggers. 

BeachGrit and Surf Splendour, very easy to win, Charlie and David Lee Scales have an obstinacy to move that verges on the masochistic, Whoop on the Waves, 1500 members, Jiu Jitsu, 2500, not so much.

So you get up a little earlier, go for a run, catch a dozen extra waves, put extra heat behind that strangle.

All to beat people I’ll never meet, never surf or roll with, but for whom I will kill myself to destroy.

Antipatico.

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