Essay One Outline Chart
Important: You are required to structure your essay using the outline below. The final draft of
your essay should be developed from this outline using full paragraphs like any traditional essay.
Please also see the model student essay in Modules.
Table 1 Title of Essay
General Essay Topic: Your 2
Thesis Ideas
X:Y
Table 2 Introduction
Hook that gets your readers interested in
this essay topic.
Go to pages 29-30 in Rise of Superman and
summarize at least 5 qualities that
Csikszentmihalyi thinks are characteristic of
a flow state in your own words. (No
quotations.)
Provide a personal example of a flow
experience of your own in the form of a
detailed story. The flow experience does
not have to be about a sport.
1 transition sentence that defines “extreme
sport” and credits Kotler’s book by his full
author name and title.
In Your Thesis answer the following two
questions in one sentence:
• What do you think are the two most
important benefits of being in a
flow state for extreme sport
athletes?
• Why are those two flow effects
important for extreme sport
athletes?
•
•
•
•
•
Table 3 Body Paragraph One
Topic Sentence: Restate the first benefit
of being in a flow state that is most
beneficial for extreme sport athletes.
Example from first Kotler athlete:
Provide a quotation in MLA format.
Reduce to 3 lines if longer using ellipses.
Less than 4 lines:
Kotler writes, “XX” (35).
Explain what the quotation is saying in
detail in your own words. Make sure a
reader unfamiliar with the text would be
able to understand you without confusion.
Aim for 4-5 or more sentences.
Example from second Kotler athlete:
Provide a quotation in MLA format.
Reduce to 3 lines if longer using ellipses.
Less than 4 lines:
Kotler writes, “XX” (35).
Explain what the quotation is saying in
detail in your own words. Make sure a
reader unfamiliar with the text would be
able to understand you without confusion.
Aim for 4-5 or more sentences.
Argument: How do the two quotations
above support your main idea?
Important: Go beyond merely restating
your thesis idea. Argue for it by providing
a deeper analysis of reasoning and
significations of your main idea.
Add a concluding sentence reminding the
reader of how your examples support your
topic sentence claim. Should look similar
to topic sentence but be more detailed.
Table 4 Body Paragraph Two
Topic Sentence: Restate the second benefit of
being in a flow state that is most beneficial for
extreme sport athletes.
Example from Kotler athlete:
Provide a quotation in MLA format.
Reduce to 3 lines if longer using ellipses.
Less than 4 lines:
Kotler writes, “XX” (35).
Explain what the quotation is saying in detail in
your own words. Aim for 4-5 or more sentences.
Example from Kotler athlete:
Provide a quotation in MLA format. Reduce to
3 lines if longer using ellipses.
Less than 4 lines:
Kotler writes, “XX” (35).
Explain what the quotation is saying in detail in
your own words. Make sure a reader unfamiliar
with the text would be able to understand you
without confusion. Aim for 4-5 or more
sentences.
Argument: How do the two quotations above
support your main idea?
Important: Go beyond merely restating your
thesis idea. Argue for it by providing a deeper
analysis of reasoning and significations of your
main idea.
Add a concluding sentence reminding the reader
of how your examples support your topic
sentence claim. Should look similar to topic
sentence but be more detailed.
Table 5 Body Paragraph Three
Topic Sentence: What argument from Body Paragraph
1 or 2 will become the focus of your counterargument /
rebuttal?
Counterargument:
Start with an introductory phrase like
Introduce the counterargument position
on the topic:
1. “My opponent thinks that____ because they
believe________” or
Your opponent’s evidence. Can
introduce new quotations here:
2. “Some might disagree that _______ because
they believe ___________.”
Your opponent’s counterargument
reasoning:
Rebuttal:
Start with an introductory phrase like
Introduce your rebuttal position on the
topic:
1. “I disagree with my opponent ____ because
________” or
Your evidence. Can introduce new
quotations here:
2. “I still believe that _______ because
___________.”
Your rebuttal reasoning:
Concluding sentence
Table 6 Conclusion
Restate your thesis using new wording (no
cutting and pasting from thesis itself)
Your call to action for this topic
Your last reflections on this topic.
•
•
Text copyright © 2014 by Steven Kotler
All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.
Published by Amazon Publishing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo and Amazon Publishing are trademarks of
Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.
eISBN: 9781477850831
Cover design by Dave Stanton
Author photograph © Ryan Heffernan
Cover art © Scott Serfas
Contents Start Reading
Preface: The Why of Flow
Introduction: Before the Flow
PART ONE HE IS THIS FRENZY
1 The Way of Flow
2 The Wave of Flow
3 The Where of Flow
4 The What of Flow
5 The Flow Shortcut
PART TWO FLOW HACKER NATION
6 Outer Flow
7 Inner Flow
8 The We of Flow
9 The Flow of Imagination
PART THREE TIME TO RISE
10 The Dark Side of Flow
11 The Flow of Next
12 Flow to Abundance
Afterword
Author’s Note
Notes
About the Author
Index
The tools for managing paradox are still undeveloped.
– KEVIN
K E L LY
Preface: The Why of Flow
This is a book about the impossible, but it starts with the invisible. Over the past
three decades, an unlikely collection of men and women have pushed human
performance farther and faster than at any other point in the 150,000-year history
of our species. In this evolutionary eyeblink, they have completely redefined the
limits of the possible. But here’s the stranger part: this unprecedented flowering
of human potential has taken place in plain sight, occasionally with millions of
people watching–yet almost no one has noticed.
The reason for this is simple: virtually all of this massively accelerated
performance has occurred within the world of action and adventure sports.
Certainly, surfing and skiing make for good recreation, and the X Games look
excellent on TV, but when it comes to riding 100-foot waves and hucking 100foot cliffs, most of us see daredevil magic: unfathomable stunts, insane athletes–
enough said.
Yet what appears to be impossible is actually progressive. Behind each of
these feats is a litany of small steps: history, technology, training–and not just
physical training, mental training as well. Success in these danger-fueled
activities requires incredible psychological and intellectual talents: grit, fortitude,
courage, creativity, resilience, cooperation, critical thinking, pattern recognition,
high-speed “hot” decision making–on and on, and all under some of the most
extreme conditions imaginable. Researchers recently coined the phrase “TwentyFirst-Century Skills” to describe those myriad abilities our children need to
thrive in this century–abilities not currently taught in school, but desperately
needed in society. Action and adventure sports demand them all.
Yet even this is just the beginning. Of all the things these athletes have
accomplished, nothing is more impressive than their mastery of the state known
to researchers as flow. Most of us have at least passing familiarity with flow. If
you’ve ever lost an afternoon to a great conversation or gotten so involved in a
work project that all else is forgotten, then you’ve tasted the experience. In flow,
we are so focused on the task at hand that everything else falls away. Action and
awareness merge. Time flies. Self vanishes. Performance goes through the roof.
We call this experience flow because that is the sensation conferred. In
flow, every action, each decision, leads effortlessly, fluidly, seamlessly to the
next. It’s high-speed problem solving; it’s being swept away by the river of
ultimate performance. “Flow naturally catapults you to a level you’re not
naturally in,” explains Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Ned Hallowell.
“Flow naturally transforms a weakling into a muscleman, a sketcher into an
artist, a dancer into a ballerina, a plodder into a sprinter, an ordinary person into
someone extraordinary. Everything you do, you do better in flow, from baking a
chocolate cake to planning a vacation to solving a differential equation to writing
a business plan to playing tennis to making love. Flow is the doorway to the
‘more’ most of us seek. Rather than telling ourselves to get used to it, that’s all
there is, instead learn how to enter into flow. There you will find, in manageable
doses, all the ‘more’ you need.”
Flow is an optimal state of consciousness, a peak state where we both feel
our best and perform our best. It is a transformation available to anyone,
anywhere, provided that certain initial conditions are met. Everyone from
assembly-line workers in Detroit to jazz musicians in Algeria to software
designers in Mumbai rely on flow to drive performance and accelerate
innovation. And it’s quite a driver. Researchers now believe flow sits at the heart
of almost every athletic championship, underpins major scientific breakthroughs,
and accounts for significant progress in the arts. World leaders have sung the
praises of flow. Fortune 500 CEOs have built corporate philosophies around the
state. From a quality-of-life perspective, psychologists have found that the
people who have the most flow in their lives are the happiest people on earth.
Put differently, a recent Gallup survey found that 71 percent of American
workers were “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” from their jobs. Think
about this for a moment: two out of three of us hate what we do with the
majority of our time. This is a crisis of commerce, to say the least. Yet we
already know where the solution lies. The other 29 percent of workers have jobs
that generate flow. Flow directly correlates to happiness at work and happiness at
work directly correlates to success. As CNN recently reported: “A decade of
research in the business world proves happiness raises nearly every business and
educational outcome: raising sales by 37 percent, productivity by 31 percent, and
accuracy on tasks by 19 percent, as well as a myriad of health and quality-of-life
improvements.”
Yet there’s a rub. Flow might be the most desirable state on earth; it’s also
the most elusive. While seekers have spent centuries trying, no one has found a
reliable way to reproduce the experience, let alone with enough consistently to
radically accelerate performance. But this is not the case with action and
adventure sports athletes. Quite simply, the zone is the only reason these athletes
are surviving the big-mountains, big waves, and big rivers. When you’re pushing
the limits of ultimate human performance, the choice is stark: it’s flow or die.
Ironically, this is very good news. Scientists have lately made enormous
progress on flow. Advancements in brain-imaging technologies like fMRI and
consumer “quantified self” devices like the Nike Fuel band allow us to apply
serious metrics where once was merely subjective experience. Until now, there’s
been no way to tie all this disparate information together, but recent events in
action and adventure sports solve this problem. Knowing that survival demands
flow gives us a hard data set with which to work. We don’t have to wonder if our
research subjects are really in flow: if they live through the impossible, we can
be certain. Moreover, by mapping this new science onto these extreme activities,
we can start to understand exactly how flow works its magic. Finally, if we can
figure out exactly what these athletes are doing to reliably reproduce this state,
then we can apply this knowledge across the additional domains of self and
society.
In other words, despite the unusual “them” at the center of this story, this
book is really about us: you and me. Who doesn’t want to know how to be their
best when it matters most? To be more creative, more contented, more
consumed? To soar and not to sink? As the deeds of these athletes prove, if we
can master flow, there are no limits to what we can accomplish. We are our own
revolution.
Toward these ends, this book is divided into three parts. Part One examines
just how far action and adventure sports athletes have pushed the bounds of the
possible and explores the science of why (this work is based on over a decade of
research; unless otherwise noted, all quotes come from direct interviews between
the subject and the author or historical documents). It’s here that we’ll see how
flow works in the brain and the body, how it massively accelerates mental and
physical performance, how its allows these athletes to accomplish the
impossible. As capturing lightning in a bottle is not easy, Part Two of this book
probes the nature of the chase: how these athletes have mastered flow, how they
have redesigned their lives to cultivate the state, and how we can too. Finally,
Part Three looks at the darker side of flow, wider cultural impacts, and the
future.
The great civil rights leader Howard Thurman once said, “Don’t ask what
the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive. Because what the world needs
most is more people who have come alive.”
The data is clear. Flow is the very thing that makes us come alive. It is the
mystery. It is the point. Put another way: There are difficult and dangerous
activities described in the pages of this book. The people involved are highly
trained professionals. So please, please, please, try them at home. Because what
the world needs most is Superman.
It is time to rise.
Introduction: Before the Flow
SHANE McCONKEY
We like our geniuses a certain way here in America. If they are scientifically
minded, we prefer them wild-coiffed, calculation-spouting, so far beyond the
confines of standard intelligence that only exotic metaphors may apply. If they
are artistic, we like them like we’ve always liked them–exiled on Main Street,
melancholy and misanthropic, occasionally drug-addled, often drunk. If they are
rich geniuses, we prefer them having begun poor. If they are poor geniuses, we
want them once rich and now, having lost it at all, tenaciously staging a
comeback. What we don’t want, at least not often, is genius naked and spreadeagle and forty feet off the ground–but that, my friends, is where this story
begins.
Actually, it begins a few days earlier. The year is 1993. A twenty-fouryear-old skier named Shane McConkey was putting on quite a show at the
Crested Butte Extremes. Within a decade, McConkey would become one of the
most beloved and revered athletes in the world: a dual sport master of the
impossible, one of the greatest skiers to have ever lived, one of the most
innovative skydivers in history. Back then, though, almost no one knew his
name.
Steve Winter, who co-runs the ski filmmaking company Matchstick
Productions, certainly didn’t know his name. But he was impressed enough with
McConkey’s performance that he invited him to film with MSP after the
conclusion of the event. During that session, the first thing they did together was
hike out to a cliff band in the Colorado backcountry. Winter and his crew set up
the camera below a large cornice. McConkey hiked up top. There was a
countdown–three, two, one, dropping–and McConkey dropped all right. He
blasted off the cliff. His goal appeared to be a double back flip, but a few things
should be mentioned: The first is that back in 1993, no one was throwing double
backflips and certainly not off forty-foot cornices. The second: Neither was
McConkey.
“Shane did one and a half rotations and landed on his head,” says Winter.
“We were all thinking the same thing: Holy shit, this guy’s gonna kill himself.”
Many things can help a skier’s career–being stupid in the backcountry is
not among them. “There are a lot of unexpected risks out there,” says Winter.
“The last thing we want is some kook going crazy for the camera. But Shane
kept demanding a second shot at the double backflip. We kept trying to talk him
out of it–saying the cliff’s not big enough, he didn’t have the trick, there was no
way to get enough speed.”
McConkey wasn’t hearing any of it. He stomped off and hiked up. Winter
stayed below. He had a bad feeling in his stomach. Above him, out of sight,
McConkey got ready. The feeling got worse. Through his headset, Winter heard
the countdown. That’s when it happened. McConkey blazed off the cliff–wearing
nothing but his ski boots. He did not throw a backflip. He threw what would
soon become his signature: a giant, naked spread-eagle.
“What can I say?” asks Winter. “It was fucking genius.”
THE NEW HIGH BAR
Genius? Really? According to Dictionary.com, genius is defined as “an
exceptional natural capacity of intellect, especially as shown in creative and
original work in science, art, music, etc.” But that doesn’t help us much in
athletics, especially when the sports in question are of the action-adventure
variety. What does genius look like when snowboarding? What does creativity
mean for a skydiver? How can we tell if a particular surfer is doing original
work when the proof of that work vanishes with the crashing of a wave?
Well, for starters, the obvious: we all seem to agree genius begins with
feats of mental greatness. The thinking needs to be novel, so the results need to
be beyond what most can envision. As it takes courage to push past the confines
of culture, the thinking must also be brave. Because an athlete’s canvas is
nothing more than his body moving through space and time, then an act of
genius must also be defined as an act of redefinition–redefining what is possible
for the human body. Which is to say, in the world of action and adventure sports,
the easiest way to hunt genius is to look for those athletes consistently betting
their asses on the impossible.
And this is where things start to get strange–because quite a few asses have
been on the line these last two decades. Not too long ago the idea of anyone
jumping a motorcycle over a bunch of school buses was so incredible that the
whole world tuned in every time Evel Knievel decided to give it a go. These
days, on any given weekend, in arenas all over the world, you can watch dozens
of riders jumping similar distances–only backflipping as they go. Go back
twenty-five years in skiing and the 360 was just about the hardest trick anyone
could throw. These days, it’s the entry point to jib skiing–meaning kids age six
are pulling them off routinely. On the other side of that coin, in 1998, when skiindustry giant Salomon introduced the 1080–their first twin-tip ski–they were
given that name because three spins (1080 degrees) was jib skiing’s Holy Grail,
an impossible. Well, been there, done that. In 2011, Bobby Brown threw the
world’s first Triple Cork 1440–which is four spins and three flips, and all offaxis.
Along the way, world records have been broken and broken again. Many of
these are records no one thought should even exist: records that were beyond the
pale, beyond the possible. Kayakers paddling straight-drop waterfalls are a good
example. In 1997, Tao Berman blew minds when he sent an eighty-three-footer
on the El Tomata River near Vera Cruz, Mexico. It should have been a world
record, but as close to an official measurement as anyone got was noting that a
seventy-foot rope tossed over that cliff “appeared” to end ten feet above the
ground. While that argument was going on, Shannon Carroll popped off
Oregon’s Sahalie Falls–a mere seventy-eight feet–but still staggering and highly
visible, and the record was hers. Two years later, Berman stormed back,
dropping all ninety-eight feet and four inches of Upper Johnson Falls in Banff
National Forest. That record stood for nearly ten years–an eternity in today’s
game–but then eight or nine athletes (the ninth belonging to, according to Canoe
& Kayak magazine, “the creepy German guy on YouTube whose footage cannot
be confirmed”) battled the number up to 108 feet, only to be fought off in 2009
by Pedro Olivia’s 127-foot launch on the Rio Sacre in Brazil. Olivia entered the
water at seventy miles per hour, which was so far beyond what most thought a
kayaker could survive that this record too was believed unbreakable. That
thinking lasted three months, until Tyler Bradt plunged 189 feet off Washington
State’s Palouse Falls, marking the occasion with a short video of his own, telling
audiences: “[T]his is a major step up from what anyone’s done before. It’s kind
of an unknown realm for kayaking and what the human body can take off of a
waterfall.”
Yeah, you think?
Oddly, though, here in the early twenty-first century, there’s plenty of talk
about our sports becoming softer, milder, less deadly. Interest in boxing, for
example, continues to wane. The new illegal-hits rules in the NFL protect
“defenseless players,” which more and more seems to include anyone wearing
pads. The 2011 technical-foul changes in basketball make even aggressive
gestures–punching the air, jumping up and down, waving arms in disbelief–offlimits. As a result, point guards, almost by definition the smallest guys on the
court, are having their greatest seasons ever and the NBA enforcer Ron Artest–
infamous for coldcocking a fan–officially changed his name to Metta World
Peace.
But that’s only half the picture. At the same time that competitive ball
sports have become less dangerous, action and adventure sports have become
increasingly harebrained. In rock climbing, skydiving, snowboarding, skiing,
motocross, mountain biking, mountaineering, skateboarding, surfing,
windsurfing, kite surfing, cave diving, free diving, parkour, etc., the list of onceimpossible feats continues to shrink. “In this day and age,” says Micah Abrams,
former ESPN.com senior editor for action sports, “the upper echelon of
adventure sport athletes are grappling with the fundamental properties of the
universe: gravity, velocity and sanity. They’re toying with them, cheating death,
refusing to accept there might be limits to what they can accomplish.”
These athletes…well, that’s the great irony, right? Many people don’t even
consider them that. They’re the poster children of the slacker generation, the
ones marked with an X, who still, some two decades after the fact, continue to
smell like teen spirit. But along the way, they have somehow become so much
more: a force pushing evolution further, the tip of the spear, the ones charged
with redefining what it means to be human. As Mike Gervais, one of the world’s
top peak-performance psychologists, says: “There’s a natural urge to compare
athletes to athletes, but trying to compare a guy like Shane McConkey to a guy
like Kobe Bryant misses the mark entirely. It’s almost apples and oranges.
McConkey’s got more in common with fourteenth-century Spanish explorers
than anyone playing on the hardwood. You want to compare these athletes to
someone, well, you’ve got to start with Magellan.”
ULTIMATE HUMAN PERFORMANCE
Even if you start with Magellan, comparisons are still problematic. The issue is
evolution, specifically the snail’s pace at which it typically proceeds. As athletic
ability is directly shaped by natural selection, for most of the 150,000 years our
species has been on this planet, progress has been incremental at best.
Historically, our ancestors performed pretty much the way their ancestors
performed. Certainly, there has been some improvement, but when plotted on a
graph the results show slow change stretched across centuries. At no period in
human history did we add an extra foot to our vertical leap between generations.
Daughters could not outpace mothers and mothers could not outpace
grandmothers, and this was just the way things were.
But in the world of high adrenaline, this is no longer the way things are.
Examples are helpful. The sport of platform diving debuted at the 1904
Olympics. That year, an American eye doctor named George Sheldon took gold
with what was then considered a difficult and dangerous dive: the double front
somersault. Today, slightly more than a hundred years later, the reverse four and
a half occupies a similar spot. If you measure progress using degrees of rotation,
then a single flip (or spin) produces 360 degrees of rotation and Sheldon’s 1904
double totaled out at 720 degrees. Meanwhile, the 2004 reverse four-and-a-half
produces 1,620 degrees (180 for the direction change, an additional 1,440 for the
flips). This means the sport of diving took more than a century to advance by
900 degrees of rotation.
Now compare this to the past decade in “Big Air” skiing. Exactly as it
sounds, a Big Air competition is nothing more than a giant jump, with skiers–
much like divers–judged on the maneuvers they can execute between takeoff and
landing. In 1999, Canada’s JF Cusson won the first ever X Games Big Air
competition with a Switch 720. “Switch” means he took off backward (and
landed backward), while the 720 is a measure of degrees of rotation. And forget
difficult and dangerous; in 1999, the Switch 720 was considered downright
insane.
That designation didn’t last long. Just twelve years later, during the 2011 X
Games, TJ Schiller took Big Air silver with a Double Cork 1620. Cork is an offaxis flip (meaning the athletes tumble through the air sideways instead of
vertically), so a double cork is two off-axis flips, or 720 degrees of rotation. The
1,620 measure refers to flat spins–in this case, four and a half. If you discount
the added difficulty of flipping while spinning and simply measure progress in
rotations, from takeoff to touchdown, Schiller’s trick measured out to 2,340
degrees of rotation. Think about this for a moment. Diving took a century to add
900 degrees to its tally, but skiers somehow pushed their total up 1,640 degrees
in slightly more than a decade?
Such eye-popping progress isn’t just found in skiing. The Baker Road gap
is one of snowboarding’s most iconic jumps. Situated on Mount Baker, deep in
the Cascade Range, the gap measures forty feet end to end and is conveniently
positioned on the road that runs between the resort’s main lodge and upper
lodge. In 1990, when Shawn Farmer first cleared this chasm, his was one of the
biggest jumps anyone had ever undertaken. In 2005, the appropriately
nicknamed Norwegian rider Mads “Big Nads” Jonsson launched 187 feet,
setting a new world record along the way and raising an obvious question:
When, in the history of sport, has athletic performance quintupled in fifteen
years?
Then there’s freestyle motocross. Since the invention of the motorcycle,
the backflip has been the sport’s Holy Grail. Because of the weight of a bike and
the aerodynamics involved, everyone from professional scientists to professional
athletes considered the feat impossible. Then both Travis Pastrana and Mike
Metzger landed backflips during the 2002 X Games. The following year, athletes
added a midair heel click to the trick. They were soon doing them one-handed
and no-handed and no-footed and off-axis. Just four years later, Pastrana doubled
down on impossible and pulled off the world’s first double backflip. “There’s
just no easy way to describe what we’re seeing in motocross,” says Dr. Andy
Walshe, head of athletic performance at Red Bull. “The sport is so challenging
and the risk of serious injury so high, it’d be ridiculous to expect anything but
incremental progress. It took riders decades to close in on the back flip. To get to
double backflips four years later? It’s hard to wrap your head around that.”
And there you have it, the central mystery of this book: How is any of this
possible? Why, at the tail end of the twentieth century and the early portion of
the twenty-first, are we seeing such a multisport assault on reality? Did we
somehow slip through a wormhole to another universe where the laws of physics
don’t apply? Where gravity is optional and common sense obsolete?
These are more than idle curiosities. If the term impossible means anything
here, it means the barriers being shattered exist beyond the confines of both
biology and imagination. These feats are paradigm-shifters. Historically, in
science and culture, breakthroughs of this ilk emerge once or twice a century.
Not five times a decade. So decoding these phenomena tells us something deep
and important about accelerating human potential, creativity, and innovation–but
it tells us more than that.
The past three decades have witnessed unprecedented growth in what
researchers now term ultimate human performance. This is not the same as
optimal human performance, and the difference is in the consequences. Optimal
performance is about being your best; ultimate performance is about being your
best when any mistake could kill. Both common sense and evolutionary biology
tell us that progress under these “ultimate” conditions should be a laggard’s
game, but that’s not exactly what the data suggests.
Instead, over the past thirty years, in the world of action and adventure
sports, in situations where asses really were on the line, the bounds of the
possible have been pushed further and faster than ever before in history. We’ve
seen near-exponential growth in ultimate human performance, which is both
hyperbolic paradox and considerable mystery. Somehow, a generation’s worth of
iconoclastic misfits have rewritten the rules of the feasible, not just raising the
bar but often obliterating it altogether. And this brings up one final question:
Where–if anywhere–do our actual limits lie?
THE QUESTION OF COST
If you want to really understand this question of limits, you have to understand
December 23, 1994–the day the game changed. The epicenter of this shift was
Maverick’s, a dark, gray beast of a wave, located two miles off Pillar Point
Harbor, twenty-two miles south of San Francisco, deep in the shark-infested
waters of California’s Red Triangle. Surfer magazine once described the spot as
“gloomy, isolated, inherently evil,” and the website Mavericksurf.com explains
why: “With waves cresting as high as fifty feet, ridiculously strong currents,
dangerous rocks, perilously shallow reefs, and bone-chilling water temperatures,
Maverick’s is like no other place on earth.”
It’s also a place that wasn’t supposed to exist. “Since the beginning of
modern surfing,” says professional surfer and surf filmmaker Chris Malloy, “if
you wanted to ride big waves, you were going to Hawaii, because everyone
knew that was the only place in the world with real big waves. When stories
about Maverick’s started hitting the islands, no one believed them. The idea that
there was a true beast breaking off the coast of Northern California was heresy.”
And then it wasn’t.
Maverick’s was first discovered back in 1962, but only a local named Jeff
Clark was crazy enough to paddle out. And he kept paddling out. Clark, in as
close to a definition of madness as can be found in the sport, surfed Maverick’s
alone for over fifteen years. In the early 1990s, he finally decided some
company was in order, so he invited a few friends along for the ride. It was quite
a ride. Pretty soon, as Jon Krakauer penned in Outside, “rumors started to drift
up and down the coast about a mysto surf break near Half Moon Bay that
generated thick, grinding barrels tall enough to drive a bus through. They were
reputed to be at least as big as the famous waves that rumbled ashore at Hawaii’s
Waimea Bay, the Mount Everest of surfing.”
For the surfers who made their names riding giants in Oahu, Maverick’s
was the wave they refused to believe in, the wave that threatened their territorial
hold on unparalleled excellence. But the rumors didn’t stop, and something had
to be done. So in December of 1994, when a monstrous Aleutian storm sent
furious pulses down the California coast, three of the world’s most famous
Hawaiian big-wave riders–Ken Bradshaw, Brock Little, and Mark Foo–boarded
red-eye flights to San Francisco to see for themselves.
Of the trio, Foo was arguably the most well known. This wasn’t just about
talent. All three were ferocious watermen, but Foo was equally ferocious about
fame. In the late 1980s, when he quit the pro tour and decided to make his bones
in big surf, his strategy was twofold. Until his arrival, big-wave riders had taken
a no-frills, shortest-path-out-of-danger approach to their craft. Wipeouts were
avoided at all costs, because wipeouts could kill. But Foo carried his small-wave
slasher’s style into the larger surf. He took bigger risks and–the other portion of
his strategy–he bragged about them too. “If you want to ride the ultimate wave,”
said Foo–as often as possible, always when there were journalists around– “you
have to be willing to pay the ultimate price.”
Foo cultivated fame. His Rolodex contained the names and numbers of the
world’s best surf photographers. Rarely did he venture into the waves without
making a few phone calls first. On December 23, 1994, he didn’t have to bother.
Throughout the 1990s, Maverick’s fearsome reputation had been growing, but
the winter of ’94 brought some of the biggest waves in history to California’s
coast. December’s four weeks would soon be dubbed “the month full of
monsters” and the media couldn’t resist. By the time Foo, Bradshaw, and Little
made it out to the lineup, there was a helicopter buzzing overhead and three
boats filled with photographers parked just outside the impact zone.
Despite the hype, that morning turned out to be disappointing. A few big
beasts rolled through, not the bedlam that had been expected. This changed a
few minutes before noon. Black lines appeared on the horizon, and someone
onshore screamed, “Set!” The events that would make this date famous in
history were only, horribly, moments away.
The gentlemen from Hawaii wasted no time. Both Foo and Bradshaw
started paddling for the second wave of the set. According to surfer’s code,
because Bradshaw was positioned deeper–that is, closer to the wave’s curl–the
ride was his. To be sure, there were plenty of days when Bradshaw would have
staked that claim–hell, there was a river of bad blood between Bradshaw and
Foo–but during the past year the two had become close. To honor that friendship,
in a decision he’ll spend the rest of his life second-guessing, Bradshaw pulled
out of the wave.
Foo dropped in.
Ironically, the wave wasn’t much by local standards. Faces there have been
measured to eighty feet–the size of an apartment complex. This one was merely
a house. But surf legend Buzzy Trent said it best: “Waves are not measured in
feet and inches, they are measured in increments of fear.” And Maverick’s, no
matter the size, is the stuff of nightmares. Just the hydraulics alone are
ridiculous. In seconds, the wave can radically change shape: wall, drop, lift,
kink, shimmy, shake. And for first-time riders, there’s really no telling what’s
coming next.
In this particular case, the wave jacked up and the bottom fell out. In the
resulting chop, Foo dug a rail and pitched himself headfirst into hell. For a
moment, it looked like he had enough speed to punch straight through the wave,
but he didn’t dive deep enough. The curl caught him, snatching him up, hurling
him over the falls. In photographs of the event, Foo can be seen just then, in
ghostly silhouette, trapped inside the very belly of the beast.
These photographs are the last time anyone saw Mark Foo alive. Exactly
what killed him, no one knows. Maybe he hit his head on the reef and blacked
out; maybe he snagged his leash on a rock and couldn’t pull free. Whatever the
case, his body was found an hour later, floating facedown in the water outside
the harbor entrance.
Word of his death traveled fast and far. Newspaper stories, magazine
articles, television features–the coverage kept coming. “The publicity
surrounding the event was unprecedented,” wrote Jason Borte at Surfline. “The
story quickly spread around the world. Although [Foo] wasn’t around to enjoy it,
it was the sort of fame he always wanted.” It was, without question, the most
public moment in surf history. It was also something of an “I told you so”
moment.
Since the early 1980s, action and adventure athletes had been pushing into
increasingly dangerous territory. If for no other reason than the law of large
numbers and the frailties of the human body, it was only a matter of time.
Everybody knew, sooner or later, somebody was going to die. “The fact that
someone had died surfing Maverick’s was a shock,” wrote big-wave rider Grant
Washburn in Inside Maverick’s: Portrait of a Monster Wave, “but not surprising.
That it was Foo, one of the most experienced and prepared athletes in the sport,
was hard to grasp. He was one of the best, and that left us all more vulnerable
than we had hoped.”
Thus the plot thickens. The theory of evolution says we exist to pass along
our genes. Fundamental biology tells us that survival is the name of the game. So
potent is this dictate that in 1973 the psychologist Ernest Becker won a Pulitzer
Prize for The Denial of Death, arguing that everything we think of as
civilization–from the cities we build to the religions we believe in–is nothing
beyond an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the awful knowledge
of our own mortality. A chorus of researchers has since seconded this opinion.
These days, scientists consider the fear of death the fundamental human
motivator, the most primary of our primary drives.
Then Mark Foo died.
Before his passing, it could be said that the consequences of tickling the
edge were still somewhat unknown. Certainly, others had died for these dreams.
Mountain climbers went by the dozen. Skydivers too. And skiers? In Chamonix
alone, nearly sixty perished every year. Somehow, though, there had always been
a way to rationalize these events. Inexperience, bad equipment, bad weather,
freak accident, whatever. Mark Foo, though, was a household name. When he
went, he took plausible deniability with him.
Evolutionary science tells us his extremely well-publicized death should
have produced a serious downtick in the pursuit of the dumb and the dangerous.
Athletes, realizing their lives really were on the line, should have started backing
away from the line. But–um–that’s not what happened.
Not even close.
In 1994, the number of big-wave riders in the world totaled less than a
hundred. These days, it’s well into the thousands. The same holds for the
extreme wing of every other action and adventure category. The phenomenon is
ubiquitous. Right now, more people are risking their lives for their sports than
ever before in history, and, as Thomas Pynchon wrote in Gravity’s Rainbow, “It
is not often that Death is told so clearly to fuck off.”
Trying to explain why this is happening is not easy. In the years since
Darwin published The Origin of Species, survival and procreation have become
the only scientifically acceptable answers to “What is the meaning of life?” This
recent upswing in gleeful, wanton abandon pushes hard on these answers,
challenging foundational notions in biology, psychology, and philosophy. This,
then, is the gauntlet thrown by the likes of Mark Foo and Shane McConkey, the
very far frontier, the razor’s edge of our knowledge, the uneasy and somewhat
spiritual truth that for an ever-burgeoning segment of the human population,
these sports really are worth dying for.
PA R T O N E
HE IS THIS FRENZY
Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the frenzy with
which you should be inoculated? Behold, I teach you the overman: He is this
lightning; he is this frenzy.
– FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
1
The Way of Flow
D A N N Y WAY A N D T H E S H O R T E S T PAT H T O WA R D
SUPERMAN
It’s the last day of the women’s team gymnastic competition in the 1996
Olympics. In the history of the games, the United States has never beaten the
Russians in this particular contest, but that record looks about to fall. Going into
the final rotation, the US has a significant 0.897-point advantage. Only a
complete collapse on the vault stands between these women and their dreams.
Then the unthinkable begins to happen. The first four American gymnasts all
take extra steps on their landings. Next, Dominique Moceanu falls on her first
vault, then again on her second. That commanding lead has been erased. It’s
down to Kerri Strug, but hers is a difficult trick, and she underrotates, lands
awkwardly, and hears a loud snap. Her ankle is now badly sprained. She is
limping, in considerable pain, but if she doesn’t stick her next attempt, the
Russians will take home gold.
The United States is in a tough spot. Strug, a four-foot-nine gymnast from
Tucson, Arizona, has always been their weakest link. As ESPN The Magazine
once wrote: “Strug…does not possess the fearlessness, the toughness, the
aggressiveness, the heart and the threshold of pain as her teammates.” All of this
changes on her second attempt. She tears down the runway, nails her back
handspring, flawlessly flips over the vault, and perfectly lands a difficult twisting
dismount. On impact, she hears another snap. Gingerly, like a dancer, Strug
tucks that leg behind her, never losing her balance. She hops in one direction,
then another, both times raising her arms in the traditional judges’ salute. An
instant later she collapses, but not before scoring a 9.712 and taking home the
hardware.
I mention all of this in a book about action and adventure sports because,
again, comparisons are helpful. Strug’s vault is considered one of the greatest
moments in gymnastics history and the defining moment of the 1996 games. The
entire women’s team is now remembered as the Magnificent Seven, and Strug
herself earned the athletic trifecta: her face on a Wheaties box, a Sports
Illustrated cover, and a trip to the White House. Danny Way has none of these
things. In fact, unless you are a serious skateboarding devotee, there’s a pretty
good chance you don’t know his name, let alone what he accomplished on July
12, 2005.
So let’s return to Strug’s final vault. Imagine a similar set of circumstances
with a few key differences. Instead of a bad sprain, the ankle is shattered.
Fractured into pieces. The foot is the size of a cabbage and the knee isn’t
working quite right. Instead of having to weigh an injured joint and stumble fifty
feet to the start of the runway, imagine having to climb ten long flights of stairs
on a broken bone. The pain is agonizing, but the view from the top even worse.
The launch pad is a wobbly platform a couple hundred feet off the ground. No
safety nets either, so any fall could be fatal.
Just to keep things interesting, let’s make a few more changes. Strug later
told reporters she’d performed that exact trick over a thousand times, a fact not
difficult to understand because the vault doesn’t change between attempts. But
what if it did? Instead of the same old apparatus, imagine a brand-new one—the
largest ever constructed: longer than a football field, with a springboard capable
of pitching a human body some seventy feet into the air. Suddenly, this is not a
vault that anyone has done a thousand times—it’s a “megavault” no one has ever
done before. A completely de novo experience, an unknown, an impossible—
and one with exceptionally dangerous consequences. Now, hopefully, you’re
starting to understand what Danny Way was up against when he attempted to
jump the Great Wall of China on a skateboard.
If not—well, you’re not alone.
Danny Way, considered by many to be the greatest skateboarder of all time,
first introduced the world to the MegaRamp in the 2003 skate flick The DC
Video. Very few knew what to make of it. At first glance, the contraption is
utterly befuddling, more like an outtake from a surrealistic painting than
anything anyone would ever skate down. “It was like three times the size of
anything I had ever seen in skateboarding,” pro Australian rider Jake Brown told
the New York Times. “It was crazy. It still is crazy.” Brown, it should be
mentioned, once crashed fifty feet straight down on a MegaRamp
miscalculation. He hit so hard that his sneakers shot off and he was knocked out
cold. Many who witnessed that fall thought he was dead.
In 2004, Way convinced the X Games to make the MegaRamp the center
of their skateboarding competition, claiming it was the only way he’d ever
consider competing in the event. Not surprisingly, he took home gold. That same
year, he also saw the Great Wall from an airplane window and decided that
jumping over it was the next thing he wanted to accomplish. He went to China
on an inspection trip, trying to find a suitable launch point, finally settling on the
majestic Ju Yong Guan gate. “It’s the widest spot in the wall,” said Way, “which
I think does the most justice to skateboarding and the possibility of breaking a
world record.”
It turned out the spot was actually a little wider. A few weeks into the
ramp’s construction, the architects realized they’d made a measurement mistake
and the distance required to jump the wall was considerably greater than first
imagined. Way, now back in the States, was reached via satellite phone. “I think
you’re going to have to clear more than seventy feet to make it,” he was told,
“isn’t that, I mean, just too gnarly?” Danny didn’t even pause. “No,” he said, in a
statement that has since ended up printed on T-shirts: “Nothing’s too gnarly.”
Still, when completed, the Great Wall MegaRamp was pretty gnarly. The
roll-in stretched more than 100 feet, roughly the same size as an Olympic ski
jump. This led to a seventy-foot gap jump over the wall, which dropped into a
thirty-two-foot quarterpipe, the largest ever constructed. According to Way’s
calculations, the pipe would launch him some thirty-five feet straight up—
almost seventy feet off the deck—so, of course, there’s no margin for error. But
here’s the tricky part: skaters make errors.
“Skateboarding is a game of failure,” says Way. “That’s what makes this
sport so different. Skaters are willing to take a great deal of physical punishment.
We’ll try something endlessly, weeks on end, painful failure after painful failure
after painful failure. But for me, when it finally snaps together, when I’m really
pushing the edge and skating beyond my abilities, there’s a zone I get into.
Everything goes silent. Time slows down. My peripheral vision fades away. It’s
the most peaceful state of mind I’ve ever known. I’ll take all the failures. As
long as I know that feeling is coming, that’s enough to keep going.”
And Way keeps going. That is his trademark. He arrives in China one day
before the event and climbs to the top of the MegaRamp. The platform is
unsteady. He bounces up and down; the whole structure starts to shake. This is
not a good sign. Two years prior, a BMX rider tried to jump the wall, but shoddy
ramp construction sent him over the landing pad and into the side of a mountain.
He died from massive internal organ failure a few hours later. Despite all of this,
Way decides to take a practice run.
It will be his only one.
Way trained in the desert, where the air was thin. In China, with the
humidity, it is far too thick. The denser atmosphere slows him down and Way
under-jumps the gap, pancakes hard, and rag-dolls for more than fifty feet. His
ankle is fractured, his ACL torn, his steering foot swollen beyond belief. He is
rushed to the hospital, but, not wanting to know the extent of the injury, hobbles
out before treatment. While this is going on, construction workers get busy. The
roll-in is lengthened, the gap is shortened, and, if Way decides to try again, it’ll
be another first descent.
Of course, he tries again. Twenty-four hours later and barely able to walk,
Way climbs those ten flights of stairs a second time. He moves slowly, his
breathing labored, his head hanging down. More than 125 million Chinese are
watching; most hold their breath. Atop the launch platform, Way paces like a
caged animal. Finally, he decides it’s time. A one-arm salute to quiet the crowd,
a shift of his weight forward, and the lonely thump of his board contacting the
ramp.
One Mississippi, two Mississippi…
It takes five painfully long seconds for him to hit the edge of the jump.
Five seconds after that it is over. Danny Way, under ridiculously adverse
conditions and with considerable aplomb, just became the first person to leap the
Great Wall of China on a skateboard. He broke two world records along the way.
And if this were typical athletic fare, this is where our story would end. But
the triumph of the podium is rarely what drives action-sport athletes. Way
doesn’t skate to break records or win championships. He skates. Period. Plus,
MegaRamps cost over half a million dollars to build—so the opportunity to play
on one doesn’t come along every day. Thus, with nothing left to prove and his
life on the line, Danny Way drags his sorry ass up ten stories once again, this
time throwing a perfect 360 over the gap. And just to make sure that one wasn’t
a fluke, he did it three more times.
“Look,” says freestyle motocross legend Travis Pastrana, “on that ramp,
with totally healthy limbs, Danny’s risking his life. But he destroyed his steering
foot and knee. Once he sets himself on the board, if either the ankle or the knee
gives by even a fraction of an inch, he’s going to fly off the side and die. If you
want to talk about pushing limits, most people can’t even stand on a broken
ankle. Danny not only stood, he withstood four Gs of pressure going into that
quarterpipe—five times in a row.”
One G is the force of Earth’s gravity—the force that determines how much
we weigh. Formula One drivers, when cornering, pull two. Astronauts, on
takeoff, suffer three. Most people black out at five. The four Gs that Way
experienced equate to more than 800 pounds of added pressure—all supported
by a shattered limb.
And forget the external pressures; what about the internal ones? Way,
believe it or not, is afraid of heights. “I’ve been with Danny on location scouting
trips,” says Darryl Franklin, one of Way’s managers, “we’ll be up high and he’ll
turn white as sheet. He’s terrified, can’t wait to get down.” But to keep that fear
in abeyance while standing atop the Great Wall MegaRamp—200 feet up and
wobbly? To have the confidence to make that run, when no one has ever done
anything like this before? On a broken limb? When the last guy who tried died
for his effort? Again, the question at the heart of this book: How is any of this
possible?
Well, to start where most start, the psychological: the undisputable fact that
the ghosts that hunt for Danny Way are unremitting. They are legion. The ghosts
of his injured brother, his alcoholic mother, his dead father, his dead stepfather,
his first coach, the man who saved him from himself, T-boned at a stoplight and
dead also, his best friend in jail for murder, his broken neck, his broken back, his
umpteen surgeries, his anger, his pride—a relentless roar only truly silenced by
the salvation of the edge.
The edge is the one place these ghosts can’t follow.
And, to be certain, this alone provides plenty of motivation, but it still
doesn’t answer our question. The weight of Way’s past and his desire for escape
merely explain part of the why—why he started skating, why he kept skating—
but little of the how. Way feels the same. “You want to know how I did
something like jump the Great Wall on a fractured ankle,” he says. “I can’t really
answer that. All I can tell you is what I already told you: When I’m pushing the
edge, skating beyond my abilities, it’s always a meditation in the zone.”
This, then, is our answer. This is our mystery: a rare and radical state of
consciousness where the impossible becomes possible. This is the secret that
action and adventure athletes like Way have plumbed, the real reason ultimate
human performance has advanced nearly exponentially these past few decades.
The zone, quite literally, is the shortest path toward superman.
And this is a book about that zone.
ALBERT HEIM, WILLIAM JAMES, WALTER CANNON, AND THE
HISTORY OF PEAK PERFORMANCE
Albert Heim found the zone as well—found it when he fell off the side of a
mountain. This was in the early spring of 1871. Heim, his brother, and three
friends had set out to climb the Santis, the twelfth-highest peak in Switzerland.
All five men had been playing in the Alps since childhood, but none were
considered experienced mountaineers. That issue was historical—almost no one
was considered an experienced mountaineer in 1871.
While the first recorded climb in history was Roman emperor Hadrian’s
121 CE scamper up Mount Etna (to watch the sun rise), historians date the sport
to Sir Alfred Wills’s 1854 summiting of the Wetterhorn. For certain, local guides
had already topped that peak, but Sir Alfred was an Englishman, and it was the
English who were then keeping score. Either way, Wills’s conquest marked the
birth of “systematic mountaineering” and the start of the “Golden Age of
Alpinism,” a decade-long stretch wherein most of the first ascents in the Alps
were completed.
Albert Heim, meanwhile, arrived a few years too late for the Golden Age.
No peak-bagging exploits are credited to his name. In fact, he’s not remembered
for his contribution to mountaineering history. Rather, he’s remembered as the
point when that history took a turn for the weird.
The events that earned Heim this distinction took place just above treeline,
at the point where the Santis’ verdant lower flanks give way to an enormous
blade of rock. By the time his party had reached the bottom edge of this massif,
sunny skies had turned to heavy snow. White-out conditions trapped them in the
middle of a rocky ledge. The way forward was down a dicey slope, steep and
narrow, with cliffs on all sides. An argument broke out about what to do next,
but they were underdressed and overexposed, and Heim decided to push on. Just
as he lifted his leg to take a step, a gust of wind snatched his hat from his head.
And Heim, without thinking about it, tried to snatch it back.
The sudden motion unbalanced him and the angle of the perch did the rest.
Heim fell sideways, flipped upside down, and spun around backward. Before
anyone could react, he was rocketing toward the lip of a massive cliff, no way to
slow down. His ice axe was out of reach. He tried driving his head and hands
into the ground, but his skull slammed into rocks, his fingers ground to pulps.
Even before that pain could register, he was airborne.
Heim’s actual flight covered sixty-six feet and lasted no more than a few
seconds, but that wasn’t his experience. The first thing Heim noticed was that
he’d dropped into another dimension. His senses were exquisitely heightened,
his vision panoramic. Time had slowed to a crawl. He could see his brother and
his friends and the horrified look on their faces, but—as he explained later—felt
“no anxiety, no trace of despair or pain…rather calm seriousness, profound
acceptance and a dominant mental quickness.”
With his life unfolding in slow motion, Heim had time to survey the
territory and begin making rescue plans. He imagined scenarios for slight
injuries, others for serious injuries: where would he land, how would he bounce,
and how his companions would make it down to his body. Then he realized he
was never going to survive this fall and thus would be dead and unable to deliver
the lecture he was supposed to give in five days. At Oxford University, no less,
his first major Oxford lecture. He’d have to find a substitute. Then again, he’d be
dead, so someone else was going to have to find a substitute. Next he tried to
take off his glasses—to protect his eyes, of course—but was unable to reach
them. Instead, he said goodbye to his family and his friends, and was that
heavenly music he heard? But wait, if he did survive the fall, then he probably
would be stunned by the impact. Since he didn’t want to go stumbling off
another cliff, the first thing he needed to do was revive his senses. A few drops
of vinegar on his tongue should do the trick, and on and on until, as he later
recounted: “I heard a dull thud and my fall was over.”
Heim survived the impact, but the mystery never left him. Panoramic
vision? Time dilation? Heavenly music? None of this made any sense. He was a
scientist by training, a geologist who would go on to do fundamental work on
the structure of the Alps and become a member of the Oxford Royal Society, yet
his experience seemed beyond the bounds of the rational. Not knowing what else
to do, Heim conducted a survey of thirty-two others who had all survived nearfatal falls. A staggering 95 percent reported similar anomalous events. What was
causing them would remain a matter of long debate, but Heim’s work marks the
first scientific investigation into the fact that high-risk activity can profoundly
alter consciousness and significantly enhance mental abilities.
Heim wrote this all up in a long essay entitled “Remarks on Fatal Falls,”
which was published in 1892. Historians consider it the first written account of a
“near-death experience,” but that term is misleading. Many of Heim’s subjects
reported these profoundly altered states without being in actual jeopardy—they
only thought they were in life-threatening situations. This was a key detail.
These experiences seemed mystical. If they only arose solely in dire straights,
then perhaps they really were communiqués from beyond the beyond. Yet if
perception and psychology were the triggers, then the puzzle was more
physiological than paranormal—and that opened the door to considerably more
interesting possibilities.
One of the first to notice these possibilities was philosopher, physician, and
psychologist William James. This was perhaps appropriate. While James taught
at Harvard, he was also one of science’s wilder men, an extreme sensation seeker
who often ran experiments on himself. In the early 1880s, those experiments
involved psychedelics, primarily nitrous oxide, but he toyed with mescaline as
well. Concurrently, James had been conducting a broad survey of the world’s
spiritual literature, trying to come up with an accurate catalog of all possible
types of mystical experiences and their psychological ramifications. He noticed
that it didn’t seem to matter what drug he tried or spiritual tradition he studied,
all of these so-called mystical experiences seemed to share deep commonalities:
all variations on the same themes that Heim reported.
James also noted two more key details. The first was that these experiences
were profound—people were radically different on the other side. Happier, more
content, significantly more fulfilled. The results were undeniable. No matter the
seemingly fantastic nature of the events, James was certain they produced
changes that were undeniably psychologically real.
Secondly, high-risk adventure tended to amplify not only mental
performance, but physical performance as well. This discovery made James
curious about the limits of human potential and led him to his famous
conclusion: “Most people live in a very restricted circle of their potential being.
They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of
their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole
organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.”
But, James critically realized, people were not doomed to stay that way.
“Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but
one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the
flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the
requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness.”
What is the requisite stimulus? Psychedelic drugs certainly provoke these
experiences, as do a host of spiritual practices. But if it’s truly a question of
unlocking hidden abilities, James shared Heim’s opinion: high-risk activity
seemed the most likely path, once writing, “Great emergencies and crisis show
us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.”
The work of Heim and James laid the foundation for a deeper inquiry into
human potential, but it was the discovery of one of James’s students, Walter
Bradford Cannon, that truly changed the nature of the game. Cannon was
interested in the strange physiological changes produced by powerful emotions.
In all mammals, rage, anger, and fear produce an assortment of peculiarity: heart
rates speed up, pupils dilate, nostrils flare, muscles tighten, digestion ceases,
senses perk and sharpen—the list goes on. Around 1916, Cannon decided these
disparate reactions were actually a global response by the nervous system to
extreme stress, a response with a purpose: increase strength and stamina.
Cannon had discovered the “fight-or-flight response” and this rewrote the
rule book. Until then, performance enhancement had always been divine in
origin. Want to write a sonnet? Talk to the Muses. Want a better time in the 100yard dash? Hermes can help. But the fight-or-flight response changed the
equation, turning a gift from the gods into a byproduct of standard biology.
And biology was hackable.
The trail of Heim to James to Cannon went from psychology into
physiology. It was a trail of mechanism: mindset impacts emotion, which alters
biology, which increases performance. Thus, it seemed, by tinkering with
mindset—using everything from physical to psychological to pharmacological
interventions—one could significantly enhance performance.
Out of this work emerged one of history’s stranger movements: the epic
quest to hack ultimate human performance—a giant, global, mostly
underground, often DIY, 100-plus-year effort to decode the mysteries of the
zone. Adventurers, artists, academics, bohemian outcasts, maverick scientists,
credentialed scientists, the psychedelic underground, paranormal researchers, the
military’s special forces, the Pentagon’s top brass, the CEOs of major Fortune
500 companies, all got involved. Yet out of this hodgepodge—for reasons that
comprise the bulk of this book—action and adventure sport athletes have
become the most advanced practitioners of this art, an elite cadre of zone
hackers, masters of the state now known to scientists as flow.
THE WAY OF WAY
Three weeks after returning from Asia, his ankle broken, his knee torqued, his
foot still plenty sore, Danny Way has a decision to make. The fifteenth
installment of the Summer X Games are being held in downtown Los Angeles,
the MegaRamp the centerpiece of the skateboarding competition. Way had taken
home the gold the previous year, but with the injuries sustained in China, no one
expects him to defend his title. No one, that is, except Way himself.
Way won his first contest at age eleven, was twice selected as Thrasher
Magazine’s Skater of the Year, five times an X Games gold medalist, six times
an X Games podium finisher, and seven times a world record breaker. He
remains the only skateboarder to have his name inscribed in gold in the Great
Wall of China, “bomb drop” sixty-five feet off the guitar in front of Vegas’s Hard
Rock Casino, or have sideline careers in professional motocross and
snowboarding. But of all the things Way’s done, nothing is more impressive than
his ability to triumph over injury.
“Danny Way single-handedly invented sports medicine for skateboarders,”
says Jacob Rosenberg, who directed the excellent Danny Way documentary
Waiting for Lightning. “When he broke his neck—that was a career-ending
injury. Athletes retired for far less. But Danny wouldn’t accept that. He found his
own doctors. He pioneered his own methods.”
Way’s methods are legendary. On a number of occasions, in order to gain a
better understanding of his injury, he chose to have surgery without anesthetic.
Big-wave rider Chris Malloy tells a story about the time he and Way had the
exact same procedure on their knee. “I have a pretty high threshold for pain,”
recounts Malloy, “I kind of enjoy seeing what I can endure. But when I got home
from the hospital, I was semiconscious, in extreme agony, about the worst I’ve
ever felt. A few days later I called up Danny and mentioned how grueling that
was. He said, ‘Yeah, the drive home was gnarly.’ We had the same procedure. I
was in so much pain I kept blacking out. Danny drove himself home from the
hospital.”
Thus, perhaps not surprisingly, just three weeks after returning from China,
Way steps onto the X Games MegaRamp launch platform and surveys the scene.
His appearance sends the crowd into a tizzy; he barely notices. “I’ve gotten
really good at pulling the veil down,” says Way, “at camouflaging reality,
locking out my conscious mind and riding my focus into the zone.”
The same must be true for Jake Brown. Moments later, he kicks off the
contest with a seventy-foot, 360 mute grab over the gap and a McTwist—an
inverted backside 540 with another mute grab—out of the quarterpipe. There’s
an electronic height meter positioned behind the ramp. At the apex of Brown’s
McTwist, the meter blinks twenty-two feet—and that’s above a twenty-sevenfoot quarterpipe. So yeah, game on.
But not quite. Bob Burnquist drops in next, comes off his board midway
over the gap, and goes headfirst into the landing. Typical Burnquist. Known for
extremely technical tricks in extremely dangerous situations, he survives due to
catlike reflexes and seriously good karma. This time is no different. Burnquist
gets his knees down at the last moment and rides the fall out on his pads.
Next up is Way. He sails cleanly over the gap, stomps the landing, and
blazes into the quarterpipe. Then everything goes sideways. He soars twenty-two
feet into the air, but drops down at a bad angle and smashes his foot on the edge
of the pipe—the same foot he mangled in China. The impact rebreaks the ankle,
then flips Way upside down. He flies another ten feet, slams hard, bounces twice,
and doesn’t move. The medical staff rushes over, the air sucks out of the
stadium. Atop the ramp, Burnquist buries his head in his hands.
Eventually, three people help Way to his feet, but he shakes off the
assistance, nearly stumbles, then drags himself to the side of the ramp. It’s a
brave performance, yet the announcer says what everyone is thinking: “I don’t
know how in the universe Danny could come back from that.”
A good question.
In 1907, William James challenged psychologists to explain why certain
people can draw on deep reservoirs to accomplish significantly more than others.
As an example, he reflected on the idea of the “second wind.”
[F]atigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or
suddenly it passes away, and we are fresher than before. We have
evidently tapped a level of new energy, masked until then by the
fatigue-obstacle usually obeyed. There may be layer after layer of this
experience. A third and a fourth “wind” may supervene. Mental activity
shows the phenomenon as well as physical, and in exceptional cases we
may find, beyond the very extremity of fatigue-distress, amounts of
ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own, sources of
strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push
through the obstruction, never pass those early critical points.
Danny Way has spent his life pushing past obstruction. Skating gave him a
family and a sense of belonging, and he feels strongly that the only way to honor
that debt is to continue progressing his sport. To that point, the medical staff
checks out his ankle. It’s clearly destroyed. They tell him he needs to go to the
hospital, that he should seriously consider calling it a day. Way shakes his head
against the idea.
“That’s not my style,” he says.
Thus, not much more than ten minutes later, Way returns to the top of the
MegaRamp, shakes off the pain, and throws a rocket air backflip over the gap.
On its own, in his condition, just a rocket air would have been a victory.
Invented by Christian Hosoi in 1986, the trick requires a skater to stand with
both feet on the tail of the board, while both hands grip the nose, and then, by
shoving the board forward, the skater and his board form the rough outline of a
rocket. But adding a broken ankle and a backflip to this mix? It’s the rough
equivalent of Leonardo da Vinci painting the Mona Lisa with a steak knife
shoved into his eye.
“That’s part of the problem with trying to discuss the level of performance
in action sports today,” says Travis Pastrana. “Danny Way did a seventy-foot
backflip on a broken ankle. But how many people in the world can even throw a
backflip? On flat ground? Over a seventy-foot gap? How about a rocket air?
None of these are everyday skills. To put them together in front of a live
audience, in gold medal competition? Most people would say that’s a home run
to win the World Series, but Danny wasn’t even done; he still had the
quarterpipe ahead of him.”
The quarterpipe throws Way about twenty feet into the air, and Way throws
a varial 540—meaning, at the same time that he’s doing one and a half spins,
he’s also reaching down between his legs and spinning his board 180 degrees—
then laces (comes in smooth) the landing. Pandemonium erupts. “If ever you say
you can’t do something,” shouts the announcer, “remember Danny Way.”
But there’s no need to remember—because Way isn’t done. Over the next
hour, he and Burnquist and Brown enter into one of the greatest duels in X
Games history. In the middle of it, Way takes another fall, stunningly hard, but
comes back a second time. He has one run left. To pull back into first place he
needs to pull off something spectacular. He does not disappoint.
Way backflips over the gap and soars out of the quarterpipe and throws…
well, no one is still sure. He spins around twice and sails too far from the vert
wall, then tries to alter his flight path by torquing sideways. This added
momentum over-rotates his torso, his feet sail up toward his head, his body spins
nearly upside down. He’s fifty feet above the deck and falling fast. The
announcer says, “Oh no.” The entire stadium braces for impact. Then Way—as
calmly as a geisha pouring tea—sets his feet back on the board and stomps the
landing.
“I’ve been shooting action sports for twenty years,” says photographer
Mike Blabac, “I’ve never seen anyone do something like it.” Not many have. It’s
been said that the four-week stretch from Way’s first attempt at the Great Wall to
the X Games landing of his 540 miracle is one of the most astounding examples
of athletic performance in action sport history. Maybe, some say, the most
astounding. Ultimately, it’s probably too difficult to make such comparisons, but,
if nothing else, Way’s performance demonstrates the depth of our ignorance. We
really have no idea how deep our reservoir runs, no clear estimate of where our
limits lie. You want more proof? In the Big Air competition, Danny Way placed
second.
Bob Burnquist, on the last run of the contest, busts out a move he has yet to
attempt, either in warm-ups or at any point during the contest. He goes switch
over the gap and switch into the quarterpipe, then tosses an indie backside 360
off the vert wall—one of the harder tricks in skateboarding (ironically, it’s a trick
invented by Way in the early 1990s). Landing one requires coming in backward
and blind. Burnquist threw the biggest indie backside 360 ever, falling more than
twenty feet before the ramp snapped into view. Watching from the side, Way just
shakes his head and starts clapping.
“Every good athlete can find the flow,” continues Pastrana, “but it’s what
you do with it that makes you great. If you consistently use that state to do the
impossible, you get confident in your ability to do the impossible. You begin to
expect it. That’s why we’re seeing so much progression in action sports today.
It’s the natural result of a whole lot of people starting to expect the impossible.”
THE GODFATHER OF FLOW
It was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced Me-high, Chick-sent-me-high), the
former chairman of the University of Chicago Department of Psychology and
now at Claremont Graduate University, who first coined the term flow. This was
in the late 1960s. Csikszentmihalyi was in the midst of what would soon become
the largest global happiness study ever conducted, though this was a somewhat
accidental outcome. To borrow Daniel Gilbert’s phrase, Csikszentmihalyi had
merely stumbled upon happiness. What he’d really been searching for was the
meaning of life.
It had been quite a search.
Csikszentmihalyi was born in Flume, Italy, which is now Rijeka, Croatia,
on September 29, 1934. The son of a Hungarian diplomat, his childhood was
war-torn, spent in flight from both the Nazis and the Russians. One of his
brothers was killed, another exiled to Siberia. When he was seven years old,
Csikszentmihalyi was sent to an Italian prison camp.
In the camp, Csikszentmihalyi learned to play chess. He became obsessed
with the game. When at the board, nothing else seemed to penetrate his
consciousness: no missing siblings, no armed guards, no prison he couldn’t
leave. Chess allowed him forget the tumult, to make the best of a bad situation.
This, he noticed, was something of a rare talent.
“In prison,” Csikszentmihalyi told audiences at TED, “I realized how few
of the grown-ups around me were able to withstand the tragedies the war visited
upon them, how few of them had anything resembling a normal, contented,
satisfied life once their job, their home, and their security was destroyed. So I
became interested in understanding what contributed to a life worth living.”
After the war, Csikszentmihalyi read philosophy, studied religion, got
involved in the arts—all the things that supposedly gave life meaning. Nothing
quite satisfied. Then, one Sunday afternoon in Zurich, he attended a free lecture
by Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology. Csikszentmihalyi enjoyed
the talk, started reading Jung’s books, and pretty soon decided psychology was
the best way to answer his question.
In the coming years, his studies took him to the University of Chicago,
where Csikszentmihalyi zeroed in on one of the hot topics of the time:
motivation. After Freud’s unconscious had been dethroned by Skinner’s
behaviorism, psychologists began having a hard time explaining why people did
the things they did. The behaviorists said it all came down to need and reward.
We do X to get Y. This is known as “extrinsic motivation,” but the conclusion
never sat right with Abraham Maslow.
One of the greatest psychological thinkers of the past century, Maslow
began his career in the 1940s on staff at Brooklyn College, where he was
mentored by anthropologist Ruth Benedict and Gestalt psychologist Max
Wertheimer. Back then, most of psychology was focused on fixing pathological
problems rather than celebrating psychological possibilities, but Maslow thought
Benedict and Wertheimer such “wonderful human beings” that he began
studying their behavior, trying to figure out what it was they were doing right.
Over time, he began studying the behavior of other exemplars of
outstanding human performance. Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, and
Frederick Douglass each came under his scrutiny. Maslow was looking for
common traits and common circumstances, wanting to explain why these folks
could attain such unbelievable heights, while so many others continued to
flounder.
High achievers, he came to see, were intrinsically motivated. They were
deeply committed to testing limits and stretching potential, frequently using
intensely focused activity for exactly this purpose. But this focused activity,
Maslow also noticed, produced a significant reward of its own: altering
consciousness, creating experiences very similar to those James had dubbed
“mystical.” Except, the key difference: few of Maslow’s subjects were even
religious.
So Maslow secularized James’s terminology. “Mystical experiences” were
out; “peak experiences” were in—the sensation, though, was the same. “During
a peak experience,” Maslow explained, “the individual experiences an expansion
of self, a sense of unity, and meaningfulness in life. The experience lingers in
one’s consciousness and gives a sense of purpose, integration, self-determination
and empathy.” These states, he concluded, were the hidden commonality among
all high achievers, the source code of intrinsic motivation:
The peak experience is felt as a self-validating, self-justifying moment.
… It is felt to be a highly valuable—even uniquely valuable—
experience, so great an experience sometimes that even to attempt to
justify it takes away from its dignity and worth. As a matter of fact, so
many people find this so great and high an experience that it justifies
not only itself, but even living itself. Peak experiences can make life
worthwhile by their occasional occurrence. They give meaning to life
itself. They prove it to be worthwhile. To say this in a negative way, I
would guess that peak experiences help to prevent suicide.
Csikszentmihalyi arrived on the scene a few years later. The birth of his
happiness study was a more pedestrian version of Maslow’s inquiry.
Csikszentmihalyi wasn’t just interested in high achievers, he was curious about
what motivated the average citizen: What activities produced their deepest
enjoyment and greatest satisfaction? This was the birth of his happiness study—
the desire to ask people about the times in their lives when they felt their best
and performed at their best.
He started out interviewing experts: rock climbers, dancers, artists,
surgeons, chess players, and the like. Next, he expanded his search to include
Italian farmers, Navajo sheepherders, Chicago assembly-line workers, rebellious
Japanese teenagers, elderly Korean women—a gargantuan assortment in total.
Surprisingly, and regardless of culture, level of modernization, age, social class,
or gender, all of these people told him the same thing: when they were at their
best and felt their best was when they were experiencing sensations very similar
to Maslow’s peak experiences.
This was a fairly startling finding. It meant that while the things people
found enjoyable varied completely—the Japanese teenagers liked to swarm
around on motorcycles and the elderly Korean women preferred meditation—the
feeling the activity produced, the why behind the enjoyment, was globally
ubiquitous. In fact, when Csikszentmihalyi dove deeper into the data, he
discovered that the happiest people on earth, the ones who felt their lives had the
most meaning, were those who had the most peak experiences.
Moreover, this did not come down to chance or luck. The happiest people
on earth worked hard for their fulfillment. They didn’t just have the most peak
experiences, they had devoted their lives to having these experiences, often, as
Csikszentmihalyi explained in his 1996 book Creativity, going to extreme
lengths to seek them out:
It was clear from talking to them, that what kept them motivated was
the quality of the experience they felt when they were involved with the
activity. The feeling didn’t come when they were relaxing, when they
were taking drugs or alcohol, or when they were consuming the
expensive privileges of wealth. Rather, it often involved painful, risky,
difficult activities that stretched the person’s capacity and involved an
element of novelty and discovery.
In his interviews, to describe these optimal states of performance, flow was
a term his subjects kept using. When everything was going right, the work was
effortless, fluid, and automatic—flowy. So Csikszentmihalyi, in keeping with
tradition, renamed “peak experiences,” instead calling them “flow states.” He
defined the state as “being so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to
matter. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought
follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is
involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”
And those skills are significantly magnified. Physical skills, mental skills,
psychological skills, social skills, creative skills, decision-making skills—the list
goes on. A ten-year study done by McKinsey found top executives reported
being up to five times more productive when in flow. Creativity and cooperation
are so amplified that Greylock partner venture capitalist James Slavet, in a recent
article for Forbes.com, called “flow state percentage”—defined as the amount of
time employees spend in flow—the “most important management metric for
building great innovation teams.”
Flow also has an incredible yet unsung impact on our economy. “When we
watch a live concert or a traditional sports event,” says former head of
innovation at Yahoo and Singularity University global ambassador Salim Ismail,
“we’re essentially paying to watch people in a flow state. Whether it’s Kobe
Bryant, Roger Federer, Jay-Z, or a jazz crooner, they’ve all put in endless hours
of work so that when performance time comes, they are fully present and in
flow. An actor with screen presence is there, too. A great poet can deliver flow to
the reader just through the power of words. We pay to watch, read, or be in the
presence of a flow experience. If quantified, you’d find it’s a major chunk of the
GDP.”
Of course, flow’s effects extend beyond profits turned and abilities
enhanced. The data Csikszentmihalyi collected was clear. Flow is more than an
optimal state of consciousness—one where we feel our best and perform our best
—it also appears to be the only practical answer to the question: What is the
meaning of life? Flow is what makes life worth living. “There are moments that
stand out from the chaos of the everyday as shining beacons,” wrote
Csikszentmihalyi, alongside psychologist Susan Jackson, in Flow in Sports. “In
many ways, one might say that the whole effort of humankind through millennia
of history has been to capture these fleeting moments of fulfillment and make
them part of everyday existence.”
Flow was a groundbreaking discovery, and one with considerable impact.
In the coming years, it would quietly reshape our world, radically altering our
thinking about everything from the limits of human performance to the
neurobiology of religious experience. It would launch outstanding scientific
debate and either wholly create or significantly impact a half-dozen fields of
academic research. Corporations like Patagonia, Toyota, Ericsson, and Microsoft
would make flow a critical piece of their strategy and culture. Entire industries
would benefit: coders in flow built the Internet, gamers in flow built the video
game industry, and, of course, the sports world has never been the same.
For athletes hunting the zone, books and training programs appeared by the
score. Flow in golf. Flow in tennis. Flow in archery. In 1993, coach Jimmy
Johnson credited Csikszentmihalyi with helping the Dallas Cowboys win the
Super Bowl, and suddenly, flow in football. Temple University sports
psychologist Michael Sachs, who made an extensive study of these states,
summed this up nicely: “Every gold medal or world championship that’s ever
been won, most likely, we now know, there’s a flow state behind the victory.”
Yet, out of all of these groups, it’s action and adventure sport athletes who
have taken things the farthest. Some of this was accidental, some intentional, but
if you’re looking for one reason why there has been near-exponential growth in
ultimate human performance over this past generation, the first thing to know is
the most straightforward: while finding flow may be the goal of every athlete on
the planet, for action and adventure sports athletes it’s a necessity.
In all other activities, flow is the hallmark of high performance, but in
situations where the slightest error could be fatal, then perfection is the only
choice—and flow is the only guarantee of perfection. Thus, flow is the only way
to survive in the fluid, life-threatening conditions of big waves, big rivers, and
big-mountains. Without it, equipment like the MegaRamp remain a pipe dream
or a death sentence. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.
Or, as Danny Way explains: “It’s either find the zone or suffer the
consequences—there’s no other choice available.”
2
The Wave of Flow
T H E M I L L E N N I U M WAV E
In the annals of find the zone or suffer the consequences, there is little that can
compare to Teahupoo (pronounced cho-poo). The word translates from the
French Polynesian as “wall of skulls” or “place of severed heads,” but neither
description quite captures. Surfers describe Teahupoo as “hideous,” “deadly,” “a
war zone,” “liquid napalm,” “the grinding eye of doom,” and, of course, “up
there with anything for tons of brutality per square inch of skin.” The website
Surfline might have said it best: “This isn’t your father’s perfect wave, and
unless seeing your next birthday doesn’t rank on your list of priorities, it isn’t
yours either.”
Teahupoo sits a quarter mile off the southwestern coast of Tahiti. It is not a
cold-water wave like California’s Maverick’s, nor a tall wave like Hawaii’s
Jaws. Instead of exploding vertically, Teahupoo detonates laterally, producing a
barrel that has accurately been compared to the Lincoln Tunnel. It is also the
heaviest wave in the world—the most mass, the most power, the most ferocity—
but unlike other famous big-wave destinations (Jaws, Waimea Bay, Maverick’s),
Teahupoo breaks in incredibly shallow water. Less than three feet below the
surface of the water sits a razor-sharp coral reef. Surf legend Laird Hamilton
summed up the issue nicely: “Jaws is all about the hold down, Teahupoo is all
about the bounce.”
And it was Hamilton, who, on August 17, 2000, just seven days after surfer
Briece Taerea died from Teahupoo’s bounce, tucked his feet into his foot straps,
grabbed hold of a tow rope, and headed out to this famed lineup. Hawaiian bigwave charger Darrick Doerner was piloting that Jet Ski and, considering what
would soon unfold, this was perhaps appropriate.
Some eight years prior, Hamilton and Doerner had together made the
discovery that made surfing Teahupoo even possible. The issue was one of
physics. Catching a wave requires paddling a surfboard to a speed roughly equal
to the wave’s speed, but big waves travel far faster than a human being can
actually paddle. As a result, since the early days of surfing, waves in excess of
twenty-five feet have been deemed uncatchable, thus unridable. As author Susan
Casey explained in The Wave: “Anything bigger is simply moving too fast;
trying to catch a sixty-foot wave by windmilling away on your stomach is like
trying to catch the subway by crawling.”
To get around this problem, in the mid-’90s, Laird Hamilton, Darrick
Doerner, and Buzzy Kerbox invented the sport of tow-in surfing. Instead of
having to paddle into monster waves, these surfers could hitch a ride on a tow
line hung behind a Jet Ski. The ski could then whip the surfer into the wave with
exacting precision and more than enough speed to catch the behemoth. The
result was a paradigm shift akin to Danny Way’s invention of the MegaRamp—it
meant that once off-limits monsters were suddenly open for business.
And business was good.
If you’re looking for another example of the recent and accelerated
progress in ultimate human performance, consider that Pat Curren’s 1960 ride of
a twenty-five-footer at Waimea Bay had long been deemed the biggest wave
ever caught. “In 1996,” wrote surf historian Matt Warshaw in Surfriders, “Laird
Hamilton caught the biggest wave of the year—a thirty-five-footer. A ten-foot
jump after thirty-six years doesn’t seem like much. The fact that a full three
quarters of that height jump was made from 1993 to 1996, however, is nothing
less than amazing.”
It was also just the beginning. Hamilton, Doerner, and Kerbox were soon
joined by Dave Kalama, Brett Little, Rush Randle, Mark Angulo, Mike Waltze,
Pete Cabrinha, and Brian Keaulana—an exceptional bevy of big-wave talent
who together formed the “strapped crew,” a reference to the foot straps used to
hold these surfers on their boards. These men pioneered both tow-in surfing and
the next phase of big-wave rescue, an attempt to make the colossally dangerous
merely exceptionally dangerous. Others soon borrowed their techniques and by
decade’s end, waves in excess of fifty feet were being toyed with on a semiregular basis.
But nothing accomplished in the 1990s compared to the madness Doerner
and Hamilton awoke to that sunny day in 2000. When both men got to the beach,
the surf was big. Too big. “The day started out with us being told Teahupoo was
completely unridable,” recounts Hamilton. “They said: ‘We don’t go out there
when it’s like this.’ But all the people who do what we do, who do things that no
one has done before, we’re not the type to accept that answer. All no means is
they don’t know for sure or there’s a secret being kept, like someone’s trying to
hide something really good. Either way, we have to try.”
And by “we” he means, of course, himself.
Hamilton grew up in Hawaii. His adopted father, Bill Hamilton, considered
the most stylish surfer of his era, had no problem taking his son to the beach. At
the time, the beach was the legendary Bonzai Pipeline, one of the more vicious
breaks in surfing. But Pipeline was Bill’s playground; thus it became Laird’s as
well.
“People always ask me if I feel fear in the big waves. Of course, I’m afraid.
If I was out in fifty-foot surf and I’m not feeling fear, then I’m not properly
assessing the situation. But it’s different when you’re raised in these conditions.
When I was a kid, I was rescued every four or five days at Pipeline. The currents
would catch me and drag me out and the lifeguards would have to come get me.
Eventually, they got so pissed off, they told my father to lock me up while he
surfed.”
Little has changed. When it comes to the questionable edge of big waves,
even among his exceptionally talented group of friends, Hamilton has remained,
as he puts it, “the crash-test dummy.” In this particular case, he had an early
morning session riding beastly Teahupoo and no problem. He loved every
minute. So the rest of the crew went out to see for themselves.
That session went well. After his friends had their fill, Hamilton decided he
wanted another go. His timing couldn’t have been better. Or worse. Right when
he grabbed the tow rope to begin his second session, the real heart of the swell
arrived. “Imagination,” says futurist and philosopher Jason Silva, “allows us to
conceive of delightful future possibilities, pick the most amazing one, and pull
the present forward to meet it.” But the wave that Hamilton chose—it wasn’t a
future anyone wanted to meet.
Doerner, from his position on the ski, saw what was about to happen and
tried to shout Hamilton out of the way. Others did as well. Even before what is
now known as the “Millennium Wave” rose anywhere close to its final height, a
chorus of “Don’t go!” erupted from surfers and spectators sitting in the channel.
But it was too late. Hamilton was already gone.
The Millennium Wave was a rogue wave, a freakish titan, the product of
two different swells intersecting and stacking atop each other. The results looked
less like a product of hydrodynamics than a very special effect cooked up by
wizards in Hollywood. “On any normal wave,” says Matt Warshaw, “the lip—
the part that is pitching ahead and forming the tube—is only a tiny fraction of
the wave. On the Millennium Wave it was almost half. It was like a dam
bursting, like someone had dropped the seafloor by thirty feet and the ocean was
desperately trying to find level ground.”
So much force was being generated that Hamilton, as he was trying to get
into position for the tube ride, found himself getting sucked up the wave’s face.
To hold steady, he had to reach down, to the outside of his surfboard, and drag
his right hand in the water. It was the perfect move and the only reason he’s alive
today—but here’s the thing: no one had ever made that move before.
“Laird had to drag his backhand,” says former Surfer editor Sam George in
Stacy Peralta’s film Riding Giants, “on the opposite side of the board, to keep
himself from getting sucked up in that hydraulic. In the middle of that maelstrom
how did his mind say this is what I have to do? No one had ever ridden as Laird
rode on that wave before. He couldn’t practice. So it was his imagination dealing
with that unimaginable energy and coming up with the plan spontaneously.”
And then things got really crazy. That monster lip cantilevered into the
reef, and the resulting thunderclap splash went off like a megaton bomb. Shock
waves pulsed into the channel. The spray shot up almost sixty feet. As far as
anyone could tell, Hamilton had been swallowed whole.
Seconds later, though, the mists parted, and out he rode, tall and
triumphant. It is no exaggeration to say nothing has been the same since.
“Laird’s wave at Teahupoo was the…single most significant ride in surfing
history,” continues George. “More than any other ride.… [W]hat it did was
completely restructure our entire, collective perception of what was possible.”
Or, at least, that’s how the history books tell the story. The real truth is
even more peculiar. “We don’t talk about it much because of the film and all the
press attention that followed,” explains Hamilton, “but I rode two other waves
that day that were bigger than the Millennium Wave. One of them had boat
wakes running through it. So not only was it bigger, but, just to mess with my
mind a little more, I had to jump these little rollers as I was riding down the
face.”
I AM TRYING TO FREE YOUR MIND, NEO
By now, it should come as no surprise that Hamilton found himself in a flow
state while riding those Teahupoo waves. Flow tends to be the psychic signature
of world-class performance and paradigm-shifting breakthroughs, and clearly
Hamilton’s effort falls into both categories. Moreover, as Danny Way pointed
out, there’s just no other way to survive such a situation. But the goal of Part
One of this book is to understand how flow makes these things possible, so these
facts don’t take us very far. Instead, to get at the answers we want, we’re going
to need to draw a much more detailed map of the experience.
Flow cartography begins in the brain. Of course it does. To paraphrase
author Diane Ackerman: That little huddle of neurons calls all the plays. But
how it calls a play like flow is a complicated affair. The brain sends messages
(i.e., calls plays) electrically and chemically and both are important here.
Moreover, where in the brain these messages are being sent further affects the
experience. So to complete our map of flow, we need to understand how the state
impacts neuroelectricity (later in this chapter), neuroanatomy (Chapter Three),
and neurochemistry (Chapter Four). Yet, before we can answer these specific
questions, we must first address a few general concerns.
For starters, why are we examining events like the Millennium Wave?
After all, many of us will never surf a day in our lives, let alone paddle into
anything nearly as fearsome as Teahupoo. But that doesn’t mean we have
nothing to learn. Action and adventure athletes have used flow to push
performance faster and farther than any group in history, so their triumphs can
become our teachers. These events are our yardsticks (so we can see what’s
actually achievable) and case studies (so we can figure out how to achieve
similar heights). The point is not that the impossible is possible for these athletes
alone—if we diligently apply the lessons detailed herein—it’s actually possible
for all of us.
Our next general concern is the definition of terms. What is flow exactly?
Scientists describe it either as a “state of consciousness” or an “altered state of
consciousness,” though neither phrase completely satisfies. Consciousness itself
is a slippery subject. There is no agreed upon definition of the term, nor accurate
taxonomy of its various states. Traditionally, researchers divide consciousness
into sleeping, waking, and dreaming, then further subdivide by degrees of focus
and alertness. The results are a progression of attentional categories from the
“total unresponsiveness” of a vegetative coma to the “hypervigilance” of the
fight-or-flight response. Flow states fall on this scale, but not exactly.
The zone requires attention, but of a very specific kind. When it comes to
the task at hand, concentration is nearly total. Laird Hamilton saw every nuance
of detail of the Millennium Wave’s face. Yet, beyond this field, his awareness
dropped off precipitously—i.e., he never heard the cries of warning coming from
the spectators in the channel. Hamilton was hypervigilant and totally
unresponsive and both at the same time. So unlike most other states of
consciousness, which are defined by a singular type of attention, flow breaks
boundaries, straddling multiple categories at once.
Nor does flow fit comfortably into the standard definition of an “altered
state of consciousness,” which, using psychologist Charles Tart’s classic
description, is a “qualitative shift in the pattern of mental functioning” [Tart’s
italics]. The issue is that most of these shifts are emotionally unstable. While
sleeping, we have good dreams and bad dreams; while taking psychedelics, we
have good trips and bad trips. Flow, on the other hand, is always a positive
experience. No one ever has a bad time in a flow state. So while the zone
provides a qualitative shift in mental functioning, it’s a far more consistent shift
than can be found in other altered states of consciousness.
Consider, for example, how Hamilton describes the experience of riding
giants, be they at Teahupoo or otherwise: “When you’re in that moment, there’s
no beginning and no end. It starts off where it left off. When you go to that
place, there’s no time, and there’s definitely no thought. It’s just pure. You are
and it is and that’s why we continually seek it out, and always search fo…
Purchase answer to see full
attachment