You Can Choose to Enjoy Getting Pummeled, and Other Lessons From Big Wave Surfer Garrett McNamara

In 2010, surfer Garrett McNamara went to the western shore of Portugal in search of big waves. Well, bigger waves, specifically. At that point, he’d already made a name for himself as a daring surfer, winning competitions on huge breaks like Maui’s Jaws and even venturing into Alaska to ride waves created by calving glaciers. But someone from the Portuguese beach town of Nazaré had sent him a photo of promising swells. So he went to check them out—and found the waves that would prompt a multi-year quest to surf the world’s first-ever 100-foot wave.

The recently released HBO documentary 100 Foot Wave chronicles that journey, including McNamara’s 2011 ride that would, for a time, hold the record for biggest wave ever surfed, at a gobsmacking 78 feet. (It would later be broken by Rodrigo Koxa, who surfed an 80-foot wave, also at Nazaré.)

For years, McNamara returned again and again, with a rotating but somewhat consistent group of surfers, jetski drivers (who tow the surfers into the monstrous breaks), and local Portuguese men who faithfully assisted in making the operation run smoothly. Prominently featured in the crew is McNamara’s now-wife Nicole, who works not only as his manager, but as a spotter on a nearby cliff, alerting the jetski drivers via radio when promising sets start rolling in.

More than anything, the documentary is a portrait of McNamara. As he gets married, grows older, has kids, and suffers injuries, he returns to Nazaré in endless search of ever bigger waves. He comes across not as an adrenaline junkie, so much as a dude who has a spiritual attachment to surfing enormous troughs of tumbling water. It’s a devotion that makes McNamara compelling—both in the documentary, and in conversation. So we called him up to ask about working with fear, surfing monsters, how to suffer getting completely pounded by a wave, and why the power of manifesting works for him.

GQ: What denotes a big wave? Where's the cutoff between a normal wave and a big wave?

Garrett McNamara: Well, it all depends on the person. For us, I would say about 30 or 40 feet, then it starts to get big. For you, four to six feet might start to get big. [laughs]

What's the first big wave you ever remember surfing?

It was Sunset Beach, and I was 16 or 17. Previously, I had a bad experience at Sunset and that made me vow to never surf waves over 10, 15 feet tall at that time in my life. It's all who you surround yourself with. I hung out with these two guys, Jasper and Fielding, and they were professional surfers but they didn't surf waves over 20 feet tall. I was like, "I'm going to be just like them. Those are my heroes." Then this guy, Gustavo Labarthe from Peru, who my brother and I hung out with a lot, grabbed me by my neck with his big hand and squeezed my neck and said, "Punky, you're coming with me. We're going up to Sunset."

I was squirming, and didn't want to go. He gave me the magic board and the perfect advice: the lineup, how to paddle out, then where to go and sit and watch, where the waves break and where to sit to be safe. I caught every wave I wanted and I fell in love with big waves at 16 years old. Then it just was bigger and bigger from there. It was all I wanted to do.

What happened at Sunset before? Your bad experience.

I got up to Sunset with my little board, I paddled out, and I took off on this wave and my board slid sideways and I fell. I was underwater forever. What seemed like forever. It was probably 10 seconds. Then it just scared me so bad and I never wanted to go back out in waves over 10 feet. But when I went back, once I caught that first wave, I was hooked.

I'm interested to hear about your relationship to fear. Is it something that you use to guide you? Is it something you try to block out entirely? How do you use or think about fear?

In the beginning of my career, I loved the fear because if I was afraid, then I was going to get the rush. Your endorphins get released when you're afraid. So whenever I would surf, I would be looking for the rush. That was where I had my fun: getting the rush in the ocean. I felt like I got the rush when I was fearing for my life, or that I might not make the wave, or that the wave's going to pound me. Then the big overwhelming sensation would come up my spine into my brain and I would just feel so alive and so good. I surfed for the rush up until about 2007.

I went to Alaska, where we surfed glacier waves [which are formed when glaciers “calve,” dropping massive sheets of ice into the sea]. It turned off the ability to get the rush in the ocean. I wasn't afraid anymore in the ocean, because the experience I had there was so terrifying and so overwhelming. I don't know how to explain it, but I was so afraid that when I went back to the ocean, there wasn't any fear anymore. I became super comfortable in the ocean. I'd kick out these crazy waves, and my friends would be like, "Did you get the rush?" And I'd be like, "Not really."

So what were you chasing at that point then?

Well, I was out to put food on the table. [laughs] It’s so amazing to just be in the water, surfing with your friends. It's the most beautiful experience. Once you jump in the water, you're paddling out, the waves are really good, you're just so happy. You're giddy. You're screaming and yelling inside, or even outside. "Woohoo, yeah! Here we go. Thank you God for this beautiful moment, beautiful day, beautiful waves.” So even if you're not getting a rush, you're getting this beautiful experience.

When people ask you why you do this, is that your answer?

I love riding big waves. I feel very comfortable in the ocean. You won't catch me riding a horse, because I'm afraid of them. I'm not an adrenaline junkie. I just really love surfing big waves. If it's small and perfect I have a good time too.

The difference between the big wave and the small wave, is it the speed? Is it the danger? What is it that makes it so much more exciting?

It's the energy, the power, and the speed. The power of the waves make it so exhilarating, and the speed is definitely a factor. It’s more the power of the waves. They say if you can harness the power of a giant wave in Nazare, you can power all of New York City.

Has feeling that power changed the way you think about the Earth or nature or anything like that?

You definitely become one with nature. You really respect, and never try to conquer, just compliment. My friends say, "Oh, you conquered that wave." No, I didn't conquer anything. I complimented it. I enjoyed it. We danced. We had this beautiful moment, me and Mother Nature, Mother Earth, the ocean. It makes you feel connected to something so much greater. Scientific fact: we're all connected. When I'm in the moment, enjoying a giant wave, it's a lot easier for me to connect to the universe, connect to everything.

There's a moment in the documentary where your brother-in-law, CJ Macias, says you've got to learn to “disobey the dictates of fear.” When you're on a wave and you're paddling in or you're getting towed in and you're like, "Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit," how do you deal with the fear in that moment?

You just enjoy it. Fear is something that we choose. We control our minds. We can choose to be afraid or not. When we choose to be afraid, we're thinking about things that happened in the past or thinking about things that might happen. Two things that don't exist anymore. The past is history and the future is not here, it's not real.

If you're in your moment on that giant wave and it's about to slam you like you've never been slammed, and you choose to go, "Right on, here we go. This is going to be fun. How nice is this underwater ride going to be? Let's see how we do." Or you can go, "Oh, I'm scared." I choose to enjoy all the moments I encounter in the water.

I mean, I could be driving on the road in the car and somebody swerves in front of me super close, which doesn't happen all the time, and I get the rush, and I'm overwhelmed with fear of potentially hitting this guy and getting crushed in this metal box. It's all where your comfort zones are, and it's all a choice. Like in that situation, I could choose to go, "Haha, that was crazy. He got pretty close, but right on. No problem." Or go, "Oh no, I almost died."

Safe to assume this is something you've had to learn over time?

Definitely. One, I've learned it naturally from surfing so many big waves. But two, my bible the book that I often go to, is Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra. It shares how important it is to accept everything, and love everything. It's a choice. Accept and love. That book should be titled A Guide to a Meaningful Life.

There's a lot of amazing lessons in it, but it's challenging to implement them into your daily life. The only way that I found that worked is by writing them down, and working on those things. Then I look at these things every day, two to three times a day, and focus on how I want to be a better person. Have your goal at the top, whatever your goal is. Mine is love my family, love my friends, love the world, and then underneath is the sub-goals and the way to achieve them.

Where do you actually keep those lists?

It's best to have one on the bathroom mirror because you go there every day. It's great to have one on the refrigerator, and it's great to have one in the car. Back in the day, it would all be pencil to paper. Now you have the phone, but I still like pencil to paper. Pencil to paper just feels so much more powerful and real.

I noticed in one of the episodes, when you're recovering from the shoulder injury, that you have mantras on the bathroom mirror. How did you start doing this practice?

Well, I was in my late 40s, or around 45, when all that went down. They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks. So I could read it, I could think about it, but if I didn't write it and look at it, and work on implementing it every day there was no change. You might change for a day or two, and then you slip right back into the normal person that we've been conditioned to be through our lives. It just seems to help so much at implementing it when you look at it all day every day. If you don't, then it's a lot more challenging to make a change. We're just conditioned and we do what we do. We kind of work like a robot. We just go, go, go.

Can I ask an example? Can you think of a time when you've implemented one of these things, or a moment where you've used a mantra?

For my career, it worked amazing. I wrote "keep surfing" at the top of the list, and then I wrote how to train, how to eat, how to manifest. Then there was a bunch of things under that. I made it very realistic. I wrote, "Win this contest, win that contest, train like this, eat like that, mind power manifest, see it happen, know it's going to happen.” At 35, I closed my store and kept surfing. So it's never too early, never too late.

The big thing is that you've got to be very careful what you put on that list as your goal. Because if you write a very realistic plan to achieve it, it will come and you will be doing whatever you choose. You've got to make sure that's what you really want to be doing. We're so conditioned these days that we sometimes don't even know what we really love, then when you get older, you discover what you really love before the world got hold of us. "Oh, that's what I really love. Okay, how do I do that for the rest of my life?"

You've got to really go back to maybe when we were three and figure out what we loved doing before the world got ahold of us. The thing is that you have a purpose-driven life all day, every day when you do it, because you know exactly what you're going for. You know where you want to be and how you're going to get there, so you have purpose all day. You're not just aimlessly wandering doing whatever comes at you.

Why do you think this process works? Because just writing it down, there’s many steps between that and actually achieving what you're writing down.

It doesn't have to be complicated. It works because you focus on these things that you wrote down all day long and you keep working towards that instead of doing meaningless, purposeless things that aren't going to get you to your goal. As long as you're doing things all day long that are going to get you to your goal, it works. If you're on Instagram or you're just doing stupid stuff that's meaningless that doesn't really do anything to help you get to your goal, then it won't work. But if you're doing what's on that paper all day long it will work.

How do you think about promotion in the age of Instagram and social media?

We were, us surfers, so against self-promotion. That’s frowned upon from my school. I started working with this manager Lowell Hussey after I won the Tow Surfing World Cup at 35. He was a senior vice president of Time Warner. He retired, came to Hawaii, and took me on as his only client. He kept pounding it into my head. "You've got to put your name out there, your face. You've got to make some posters. You've got to get a website." I was lucky. He pushed me to do this stuff that was taboo in my world.

Now this Instagram world, it is super amazing if you utilize it strategically, and check it like work. Check it maybe an hour in the beginning of the day, if you need to, maybe an hour at the end of the day, and that's it. But if you keep going on, then it's terrible. It's terrible for all of us. I lost my phone one month ago. I left it behind, not on purpose—but maybe on purpose. When I got back I go, "I'm not getting another phone." My wife said, "Oh, that's a great idea." So I don't have a phone now. I'm using her phone for phone calls, but other than that I don't go on.

What's the project you're working on now, or the thing you're trying to manifest? Is it still a 100 foot wave?

The 100 foot wave has been ridden so many times in my mind. I didn’t ride it in 2012, but they said I did. So wherever I go around the world, they go, "Oh, you're the 100 foot wave guy." I'm like, "Don't believe what you see in the media." [laughs] If I'm feeling up to it when that day comes, I would definitely love to ride it. Getting barreled on it would be the goal.

In that moment where you're about to get pummeled and you sort of have to choose the wave crushing you, what are you supposed to do in that situation?

If you can prepare, then you take a couple really big breaths, and preferably a dump breath where you blow all your air out, and you do that once, twice, or even three times. If you can get one dump breath where you blow all your air out, then you take a huge breath in: stomach, chest, and, if you have time, put your head back because there's another quarter tank there that you're going to miss out on. So that keeps you in the moment, just preparing for breathing, focusing on the breath.

Then it hits you, and you're focusing on relaxing. 100% relaxing everything. You might pull your limbs in a little bit so you don't get ripped apart, but you want to really relax. As soon as the violent pounding's over, then you just turn everything off. You can actually stay there for a long time, a lot longer than we feel we can when we're being pounded. The poundings are never that long if you're relaxed, but then when you get another one, and another one, and another one, then you start to get a little weak and potentially dizzy, and you’re hoping that the jet ski's going to show up anytime soon. [laughs] I've had 20, 30 waves in the head and had to go all the way to the beach many times.

If someone is skeptical of manifesting and they think, "Oh, that doesn't really work," how would you explain it to them?

It's worked for me so many times, but you do have to really focus on it. In Nazaré on a big day, the world record day, I got off the jet ski, jumped in the water. For me, I really connect. First I write it down and think about it, know it, but then I connect to the moment. I blow out all my air and then I breathe in this huge breath, eyes closed, blow out all my air, breathe in this huge breath, eyes closed, blow out all my air, and breathe in this huge breath, and open my eyes and connect to the universe, connect to the galaxy. I used to just connect to the highest tree, but I said, "I'm going to go further. I'm going to go connect to the universe. Let's connect to the galaxy." You feel connected to everything and then that wave came. It wasn't the biggest day. It wasn't a day where that wave should have come. I just felt it. I attracted it. I knew it. I asked it to come. It came.

The craziest thing is after we rode the wave we're going in, and thousands of fish jumped up around us and then all these seagulls flew right towards us, like inches from us. It was like we just became one with nature, became one with everything for a moment there. I personally felt it. You just have to know it. You have to feel it. You have to manifest it. Our minds are so powerful.

It sounds like an incredibly beautiful experience you had on that wave. But how come you couldn't manifest a wave like that every time then?

You've got to be realistic as well. [laughs] The swell has to come. The storm has to come. If the storm came and the waves were there, I know I could manifest it again. If I really, really wanted it.

In the documentary, you talk about preparing mentally, physically, and spiritually. What does the spiritual preparation look like?

The spiritual preparation is just knowing that there's something greater than you out there, knowing something will take care of you if you need it. There's so many beautiful teachers. Buddha, Gandhi, Jesus, I mean the list goes on. There's so many more that are coming into our lives still today. They have a connection with the divine source. There's some type of energy field up there. We're all energy—a scientific fact—so we're all connected to some amazing energy field that we're all a part of. I don't want to categorize it. I just think it's beautiful and it's there and it's something to tap into whenever you need it. It's a beautiful, warm, loving body of energy that we are a part of and that we can tap into. When you're tapping into that. you can manifest anything you want.

Does that help you in everyday life, being able to tap into that greater force?

It helps 100% as long as I am. I'm a perfect example of I've been conditioned and I'm this guy who's set in my ways. When I'm working on it it's the most beautiful, profound experience, all day every day. Just be loving, kind, and helpful in all situations. We can. Some guy bangs into your car, you don't have to freak out. You can go, "Oh, wow, this is unfortunate. Are you okay? Wow, okay, I can fix my car." We can choose to love all experiences. It's a choice. I'm not the best at it but I know we can do it. [laughs] When you do, the days are like heaven, every day.

Do you do anything in the morning to prepare yourself to be in that state?

Yes, morning ritual is very important. You do your morning ritual of reading what you wrote that you feel is the best way to be loving, kind, and helpful all day, every day. The best way to approach your career,  the best way to approach your training, whatever. Just the best way for you to approach life and have personal growth. You need to have that ritual in the morning and it really works for me when I do it three times a day: morning, 12:00, and at the end of the day.

So you just sit down and read it? Do you meditate on it? What does it look like?

First I drink my glass of water. Then I sit down and read it. Then I write what I'm going to work on for the day, out of that whole thing. Then I'll go sit down and meditate. Sometimes the meditation will be a minute. Sometimes it'll be an hour. But as long as you go to a quiet place and try your best not to think any thoughts at all, slip into the gap where there's nothing so you can have a still, calm mind for a minute. I'm kind of restless, so if I get a minute, I'm super happy. If I get 15 minutes or a half hour it's beautiful and profound. Then I'll go throughout my day, and you lose track. You'll get sucked into the world. You'll go left when you were planning on going right. Then you've got to go back, get your bearings straight, share with yourself what you're working on, and then focus on that.

This interview has been edited and condensed.