There are times when it’s appropriate to go full send. For instance, when you’re snowboarding. If you are hesitant when snowboarding and hold back you’re probably going to eat shit all the way down the mountain. You need to trust the mountain and let gravity take over.
Likewise, when paddling into a wave you want to paddle like your damn life depends on it to ensure you time the crest of that wave perfectly and don’t accidentally miss the wave and get sucked over the falls only to find yourself suddenly hanging mid-air, upside down, not knowing your ass from your elbow, only to slam into the wave and have the wind knocked out of you. If it sounds like I’ve missed a wave or two before and I’m scarred by the experience it’s because I have. I paddle like a madman to catch waves when I can. I’m not getting sucked over the falls again.
A time you might not want to go full send is when you’re ‘surfing’ on the pavement. There are certainly times when you want to go all out on the pavement (skating, biking, whatever), but this just seems dangerous and like the type of activity that inevitably ends with your buddy James’ arm snapping in half an a bone sticking out of his forearm.
Legendary Hawaiian surfer Jamie O’Brien filmed this video of him and some friends bombing a relatively unknown Hawaiian storm drain and it’s great but you won’t find me doing this. While I’ve got you, though, you need to check out the other J.O.B. video below this one after watching this clip because let’s be honest, you deserve to spend some time on the Internet watching cool shit and not thinking about the rest of the world for a little while.
Here’s that other clip I mentioned above, it’s from a recent perfect day at Pipeline:
I hiked a mountain in Zion, Utah, last November with Jamie O’Brien the day before the Red Bull Rampage Freestyle Mountain Bike event and honestly, that seems like it was a lifetime ago. I cannot even begin to express to you the ways my life has changed since then and I’m not talking about being stuck at home for the past two months. It’s wild how quickly the world can get flipped upside down.