Laird Hamilton has been through more than a few trying situations over the course of his life. One does not become a legendary big wave surfer without getting themselves into a few hairy spots, but Laird? Laird’s really been through the wringer. And on a recent episode of Shawn Ryan’s podcast, the Shawn Ryan Show, they covered a lot of ground, from his childhood to a near-drowning after Laird decided he’d throw himself off a waterfall during a rafting trip.
In this particular snippet of the show, Laird gets candid about a near-death experience that was a little more drawn out than, say, being held under at Jaws.
“I’ve been lost at sea,” he said. “I’ve spent a day-and-a-half out in the ocean in Hawaii, about 60 miles offshore. That was a different kind of near-death. It was just a longer time to think about it, but without really any imminent threat right away. But the whole possibility… like, ‘hey, I’m sixty miles from shore. I won’t be able to get back… I hope something picks up to get back.'”
Laird goes on to draw a parallel between himself and Alex Honnold, who famously free-soloed El Capitan. In short, Laird believes that they’ve both trained their brain, in a way, to deal with fear.
“He was exposed to dying and falling so often growing up,” Laird said of Honnold. “He would go into that fear of dying… because he was in that situation so often, so many times, and didn’t die — the taxation on the system is so severe and your system is so taxed from that — the body has to recalibrate. It’s like, ‘okay, you didn’t die the last thousand times you were in that situation that you thought you were going to; all the senses on full blast, we’re going to have to turn that down.'”
Whether that’s actually the case or not, I’ll leave that to some kind of neuroscientist. But either way, Laird is in a unique position to speak about dealing with the fear of dying. And he’s still kicking.
