The miracle of rest and recovery as it pertains to surfing performance.

The chef, writer, personality and cuck, Anthony Bourdain, got into jiutjisu late in life, a few years before he self-propelled to Valhalla.

His motto, as shared on a reddit forum under the handle NooYawkCity, was pretty simple,

Conventional wisdom is that I should allow myself recovery time. That training every day is not wise. I say fuck that. The clock is ticking. Im not getting any faster, more flexible or more durable. Gotta get in what training I can — learn as much as I can, get as good as I can before I leave this life like I began it: diapered and screaming.

Until this year, I felt the same.

Ain’t no time to waste. Harvest years are here.

And, if I’m not learning, training, surfing, I’m getting older, slower.

If you’ve hung around BeachGrit y’might’ve read the very occasional story detailing the myriad joys that come with affixing a digital fitness tracker called WHOOP to your wrist.

What came into relief as the data piled up was how little sleep I was getting, five hours-ish a night, and how I was hitting the mats or the water with low baseline recovery, always in the low thirty percent range.

Every day when you wake up, y’see, “WHOOP calculates a green, yellow, or red Recovery score on a scale of 0 to 100%. That score lets you know if your body is ready to perform, needs an active recovery day or requires rest. Recovery is based on 4 physiological metrics: Heart-rate variability (HRV), resting heart rate (RHR), sleep, and respiratory rate.”

What if I gave the body a little time to recover when I was running red or yellow instead of green?

What if those five hours of interrupted sleep turned into seven or eight?

And, if the delicious vodka and waters were replaced by only water?

Would I surf better?

Strangle harder?

For three weeks, I surfed and trained only on green days.

Instead of five surfs a week, sometimes two, mostly three, but hit harder and with the gusto of a veterinarian getting into the glisten of the chancre in a show mare’s dock.

And, yeah, it’s surprising, although it shouldn’t be, that a rested body mixed with a little high intensity yields unforeseen leaps in performance.

Result?

I felt like a human equipped to travel through space at a variety of speeds, communing with some inconceivable source of life.

The power of technology over nature.

Thanks WHOOP!

Juiced-up weightlifters out of the game, too!

Early days etc, like, plenty can happen over the next seven years but the International Olympic Committee has recommended “youth focussed sports” surfing, skateboarding and sports climbing, Tokyo debutantes, remain on the card for the LA Games in 2028. 

Perennial Olympic sports boxing, weightlifting and modern pentathlon, howevs, are on ice. Boxing and weightlifting have run at every Games since 1920, the pentathlon, a five-event combo dish, since 1912. 

The IOC’s prez, Tommy Bach, said boxing and weightlifting, which are on the Paris schedule for 2024, need to clean up and the pentathlon has to lose the horses to make it more appealing to “the kids.”

Bach said if The International Boxing Association (AIBA) wants back in it has to hit concerns “around its governance, its financial transparency and sustainability and the integrity of its refereeing and judging processes.”

(In 2016, an investigation found Olympic gold medal bouts were fixed by “compliant” refs and judges.)

Weightlifters love getting on the juice, that ain’t a secret to anyone, and therefore the International Weightlifting Fed has to “ensure the integrity, robustness and full independence of its anti-doping program” before their Olympic masters allow ’em to return.

Surfing, of course, was a terrific success at Tokyo, the Brazilian Italo Ferreira pushing hard against the expected narrative of a Japanese surfing gold medal with a triumphant and invulnerable campaign at Chiba’s Tsurigasaki Beach.

Of all the gold medal contenders, Italo, was the only one that carried the perpetual ecstasy of the looter.

A glorious week.

Very good news for UFC hall-of-famer and survivor of worst wavepool accident in surfing history BJ Penn who is running for governor of Hawaii in November, 2022.

Australian surfer Chris Homer has shocked election pundits and the political class by unseating the incumbent left-wing mayor to win the mayoral race in Shellharbour, a city on the NSW South Coast with a population of 70,000 or thereabouts. 

In a 2019 story in Tracks, Homer is described as a “semi-deity” and “one of the best barrel riders Australia has ever produced, had the talent to match the very best in the world.” 

The reason Homer never left the South Coast to chase a pro tour career was, according to Tracks, “with Redsands and Razors seemingly bending to suit his style, what was the point in leaving the jewels at home to chase sponsorship and prizemoney.”

Labor mayor Marianne Saliba had been in the job for ten years before clean-skin Homer came in swinging with promises of a “fresh wave of leadership”, which included leading a campaign to stop the council from building a 200-seat function centre and fifteen cabins inside one of the last hunks of dirt on the coast that hasn’t been flattened and turned into ghettoes of  developer cubist “mansions”, joints designed to be hot in summer, cold in winter and to crumble into ruins within twenty years.

Not everyone was under Homer’s thrall, howevs. Per the ABC,

During a mayoral forum in November, candidates were given 10 minutes to pitch to voters.

It took Mr Homer just over 2 minutes to outline his plans.

On housing affordability – a key issue across regional NSW – Mr Homer said his work as a mortgage adviser offered him an insight into the obstacles preventing locals finding a home.

But despite his industry knowledge, Mr Homer offered only a vague promise to investigate the issue once elected.
He was also unable to answer multiple questions related to bread-and-butter council business including parking, hard rubbish collection and building standards.

This prompted a question from the audience, “You seem unfamiliar with local and state planning guidelines. Why are you running for mayor?”

Mr Homer confessed on multiple occasions he was not “privy to the intimate details” of council – and it remains to be seen what impact that will have on the way council functions.

But his promise of an independent council not “tethered to the will of a political party” was an attractive pitch to voters hoping for a change from Labor’s grip on the region.

Small and hardly cataclysmic matters, I’d suggest, and easily examined, digested and sorted by Homer.

The win is an encouraging sign to king of the octagon, UFC hall-of-famer, survivor of worst wavepool accident in surfing history BJ Penn who is running for governor of Hawaii in November, 2022.

Like Homer, no political experience, but a heart like a lion etc.