Tom Butler nearly died at Nazaré. Perhaps you remember. It was back in December of 2016, and things went very wrong very quickly. “It was pretty stupid, looking back,” he told Paul Evans for the WSL, just after his release from the hospital. “I felt like I needed to get a score, so I just kinda said to myself, ‘next wave I see, I’m just gonna turn and go, whatever. I’d never have taken a wave like at Nazaré if it wasn’t in a heat…never. I can remember paddling in and I knew I was deep, but I was kinda hoping it would be one of those waves that break, fatten slightly and then run off.”
What happened instead, however, was that he almost died. Something nearly ripped his ear off his head. The wave shifted his ribs so much that his lungs almost collapsed. And then, to top it all off, he couldn’t find the pull cord for his vest and spent way too long underwater. Thankfully, after months of recovery, Tom Butler is back on the horse.
He’s got a series out called Think Bigger, which is something you should watch when you have a few minutes. The video above is the latest instalment and it features a 20-minute no-weights training regime that everyone who surfs should be doing.
