Overcoming Your Inner 'Pouty Bitch' and Finding Motivation
I was talking myself out of going for a training run the other day when I happened to catch a Dave Kalama blog post that really inspired me. If you are lacking some motivation this should help bury your inner "pouty bitch".
For those who have never heard of Dave Kalama he is quite simply one of seminal Watermen of our time. Both in spirit and performance he represents all that is good about the Waterman lifestyle.
As an avid follower of his blog I was reading it the other day as an excuse not to go out for my training run. It had the exact opposite effect. As a competitor in the upcoming US Windsurfing National Championships I am in need of some serious training to be competitive and have frankly been a wuss about it. Sometimes motivation finds you, and this time I decided to pass it on.
This past month in Hawaii, Kalama was training extremely hard for an upcoming race that he really wanted to win badly. So bad, in fact, he ended up overtraining to such a degree it weakened his immune system and he caught the flu shortly before race day. The race covers some 32 miles between the islands of Molokai and Oahu and can take in excess of 4 hours to complete.
Dave had recently met a young lady named Emily Hager through one of the many charity events he participates in, Pipeline 4 A Cure. Kalama and his good friend, Waterman Laird Hamilton, support Pipeline 4 A Cure to help find a cure for Cystic Fibrosis. They met Emily, who has the disease, at one of the charity's gala fundraisers they were helping to support. Pictured at top is Hamilton on the left, Emily center, and Kalama on the right.
“One of the reasons that Laird and I are involved is a surf and ocean connection–the most effective treatment for this disease is to breathe salty air,” says Kalama. A group of doctors discovered that some kids in Australia who were doing better than many others were surfing. This discovery inspired one of the most effective treatments they have for the disease today.
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