Eight men just learned how gnarly a proper prone paddleboard race can be. Well, eight men and the solid crowd watching at Piha Beach on New Zealand’s North Island. It was the second of eight events being held in this week’s The Ultimate Waterman. And one of those eight competitors just happens to be a man recognized worldwide for his dedication to fitness, Aussie big wave charger Mark Visser.
“That was brutal,” was Visser’s summation after the race. Coming from a guy who does anything and everything to train his body for performing in the ocean, it’s all you really need to hear. Sprinting about 100 yards up the beach, grabbing a paddle board, then swimming straight into head high, windy closeout sets before finally reaching a buoy about 250 yards out. Then it was back to the beach, hopefully catching a wave as far in as possible before circling around one more buoy closer to shore and swimming out through the same violent surf. He’d reach the second offshore buoy, turn around a final time and point it toward the beach again, drop the paddle board, sprint back to the start line and then run back to the water to do it all over again. Now do this four times. My own back is still sore just from watching those 40 minutes of hell.
But you get the sense talking to Mark that, even though it was brutal, he’d do it again. His philosophy toward training mirrors his philosophy toward charging: charge anything. The man has night surfed Jaws. And since that wasn’t crazy enough, he once tossed a jet ski out of an airplane over the ocean…and jumped after it. So it’s only necessary that his devotion to keeping in peak physical condition for all this is top notch.
“I do training just to prepare for the unknown, you know? A lot of boxing, circuits, runs and swims,” he says. “I just think that I want to go in confident. And the only way to really be confident is to be fit and strong. And when you’re fit and strong you have that knowing that ‘Ok, if shit goes down, I can get myself out of this situation.’”
Visser says he’d only been in a paddleboard race like this once, and like everything else he does, thinks it’s a good test of base fitness for somebody performing in the ocean.
“To be a good waterman you’ve got to be able to move around. You gotta be able to move in and out of places. You’ve got to be good at it all. You train to be good at what you do…for the reason of staying alive. And if I didn’t surf I’d train too, because I just like it.”
I guess if we all measured our fitness with “stay alive” at places like Jaws, we’d have Mark Visser’s level of dedication too.
Editor’s Note: Learn more about The Ultimate Waterman, the athletes competing for the title, and follow them on Facebook here.
