"Yes. All tattletales go up the mainsail."
"Yes. All tattletales go up the mainsail."

Surf Journalist stumbles upon great fitness mystery, discovers heart beats per minute through the roof on the days he is not engaged in dancing ballet, running record mile times, doing any sort of workout at all!

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.

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World’s most famous surf shop owner and “voice of the people” Sid Abruzzi reveals secrets to ageing disgracefully, his drunken surf reports, getting married at sixty and giving hell to billionaires!

And wait til he lights up on the east coast's own VALmageddon!

Today’s guest on Dirty Water is described by BeachGrit writer Steve Rees, as the “most famous surf shop owner in the world” and “Part animal―Part machine―Part idiot.”

While other surf shop owners obsequiously lick the boots of the clothing majors, for this is where the cash is, he sticks to his Buell wetsuits and custom boards.

If you don’t know where his little surf shop is in Newport, Rhode Island, well, good luck finding it. He don’t have a website.

He is seventy years old, still rides a six-one and he is a skilled persuader for he knows how to worm his way into a tired heart.

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Photo: ABC
Photo: ABC

Surfer hero describes pandemoniac tableau as boat’s capsize on reef leads to dramatic rescue: “I thought they were going to die for sure. The scene was just carnage.”

"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.

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WHOOP, also a digital diagnostic tool.

Medical emergency averted after surf journalist uses fitness strap to monitor vital signs of suspected overdose!

WHOOP ain't just a personalised digital fitness trainer!

It’s over. The little kid is asleep and his makeshift bed in a vestibule is being painted by a light sea mist delivered by a spring onshore. 

A few hours earlier, the house had been the site of a moderately wild teenage bacchanal, although nothing out of the ordinary. 

A dozen or so of ‘em sending it, I’m later told: boys with their synthetic cannabinoid products and girls upending bottles of pink moscato, whispering gossipy stories loudly, sweating as they twirl and laugh and dance, all of ’em sucking hell out of their Mango Tango and Watermelon Wave vape pens. 

The boys posture as tough, slightly dangerous, devil-may-care characters, drinking and smoking more than their most of ‘em can handle. As the night wears, pools of spew, in hideously abstract shapes, decorate the garden. 

One kid hits the synthetics more than he should, drinks more than he can, hallucinates, panics, heart is bouncing out of his chest. 

I’m doing my midnight rounds of Bondi, searching for inspiration on these lonely walks, cataloguing various mistakes and ways of repeating ‘em over and over, when the party pours out onto the front lawn. 

Someone yells to call an ambulance. 

A kid collapses on the front lawn. 

Can you doing anything, they ask as I stop, mistaking me for someone capable. 

He says it’s his heart. 

Heart. 

I throw two fingers at the usual pulse points.

I ain’t no doctor. It feels fast. Is it 120 or 220?

Who knows. 

I claw at my WHOOP, wrap it around the kid’s little wrist and open the app. 

Heart at 140, hitting wild 170 bumps. 

Will he go into cardiac arrest? 

I ask the other kids if he’s had any pills. 

No, no, no, of course not, they chorus. 

Yeah.

I tell ’em it’s time to be real. It could mean keeping your pal alive. If it’s pills, the kid is going in an ambulance. 

They swear it’s weed and booze.

It’s a good sign.  

Doing something, and having a little knowledge, is the key in these sorta situations according to my pal who makes tourniquets for surfers. The simple act of having something to do, he says, takes away the panic, lets you take a step back, assess matters. 

I hold the kid’s head, keep a reassuring hand on his back. 

You’re good, you’re good, I tell him. 

I watch the heart-rate steady at 140 and the spikes subside. 

Gradually, it dips below 100 and sits on sixty, sixty-five as weed-induced panic turns into a deep sleep. 

An elderly neighbour says the kid can sleep in the front room of her joint. We get his parents’ number and call ‘em. They’re thirty away. 

I stay with the kid, monitoring the heart steady at fifty-nine now, until his parents arrive. 

Much thanking, shaking hands and so on. 

Forced to rip my personalised digital fitness trainer off kid’s wrist as he’s carried to car, however. 

There’s a limit to this Good Samaritan bullshit, right? 

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In exciting surf-adjacent news, handsome actor, face of BeachGrit Leonardo DiCaprio publicly cuckolds world’s second richest man Jeff Bezos at event celebrating under-celebrated wealthy people!

Electric feel.

This is not surf adjacent news, on its face, as the two principals in the story neither surf nor SUP nor foil nor pretend to, unlike the world’s fifth richest man Mark Zuckerberg, but… Leonardo DiCaprio, one of the two principals, regularly features as the face of surf news on this very surf adjacent website.

Usually from his role in The Wolf of Wall Street.

Sometimes from his role in Django.

Once, maybe, from his role in Titanic.

Never from his role in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.

And so surf adjacent we go but did you see DiCaprio publicly cuckold Lauren Sanchez, significant other of the world’s second richest man Jeff Bezos, at the LACMA Art + Film Gala in Los Angeles over the weekend?

The event celebrates under-celebrated wealthy people, I think, but just examine the photo of DiCaprio’s interaction with Sanchez and Bezos.

Whoa.

And now, has this sort of thing ever happened to you?

A public cuckolding?

How did you react?

Like Jeff Bezos showing off muscles and a Mark Zuckerberg-adjacent sense of humor?

Share and you just may receive a new badge.

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