How Shane Dorian Trained for Wipeouts on Big Waves

When you know the wave is about to collapse on you, what do you do? I mean, you just execute your plan that you have. For me, it was more, and I don't do as much big wave stuff as I once did, 49 now, and trying to mellow out. I still love big waves, but it was my life for a while. At the time, I was training like a madman, super physically fit, working out six days a week, super crazy intense. I was working with breath coaches to do breath work and stuff. As soon as I would paddle into the lineup when I was surfing big waves, I was breathing to where I was oxygenating my lungs. You basically try to get as much air into your lungs as possible when you know you're about to eat shit or go under a really huge wave. It's just a matter of holding your breath. You just take a giant deep breath right before you go under. Like crazy, and you stuff your lungs and everywhere else as much as you can, you pack your lungs with as much air as you can. Is that you? Oh my God, Shane Dorian. What the fuck? Jesus Christ, that's scary. That's me eating shit. Wow, but look at this. Oh my God, that's so wild, dude. And when you eat shit that hard and it comes down to you that hard, how much time does it take before you can get up to the surface? It really depends. In a really bad situation, I had one wipeout off the coast of Northern California in Half Moon Bay at this wave called Mavericks where this chick was on a boat filming and she filmed me eating shit much like that. I was underwater, she was filming my board and it was tomb stoning, meaning she could only see the top half of my surfboard. The bottom half was underwater and I was at the end of a 15 foot leash to my surfboard. So my board is about 10 and a half feet long, my leash was 15 feet long, and then I was at the very bottom of that leash. And I was underwater for a minute and about eight seconds. A long time. That doesn't sound like that long, right? Fucking sounds like a long ass time. But I did a lot of breath training, or I didn't do a lot of breath training, but I did some breath training and basically your static breath hold, like whatever you can do in a pool with a calm heart rate, you can basically under pressure, if your heart rate's going crazy, you can hold your breath for a quarter of your static breath hold. Oh my God. So when I do my static, isn't that scary? Terrifying. But it's powerful because if you know that you have, say hypothetically, you have a four minute breath hold, static, then that means under pressure, like in a situation like that where your heart rate's really high and you're getting the shit kicked out of you, you should be able to hold your breath for one minute and survive. Yeah, but I can't hold my breath for four minutes. I think when we did that thing with David Blaine. How long did you think you could do it? How long did it hold my breath? We didn't finish it, but you did it for quite a long time. And he was about to teach us how to do it longer, but we didn't get that far. They can teach you how to do it longer. Well, I did it longer than everybody else, but I still didn't think it was that long. Over two minutes, I think. Yeah, but that's not that long. But I don't think it was four. Yeah. Yeah, I think it was like two and a half minutes. But Vasil Yes, for sure. But I mean, I think he does it also just for mental toughness, just like to build just ability to steal his mind and just fucking just deal. A lot of it is just being like, for me, it was great because I had that, like if you don't know that, if you don't know the science behind holding your breath for a long time under pressure with a high heart rate, then you just go into these wipeouts like, fuck, I hope I survive. I need to hold my breath. And when you have that hope type of mindset, then your heart rate goes higher and you start burning more oxygen. But if you don't have that hope, if that's not a part of your mindset, and you're just like, shit, I've done the training, I know how long I can hold my breath with a high heart rate. And knowing that number, and knowing that you're pretty much never going to be held underwater for that long, like I could hold my breath. The longest I held my breath during the breath training thing that I did was five minutes and 34 seconds. Well, hope is not a good thing for any skill. No. I hope the ball goes in the net. It's not going in. I hope I make this shot. I'm not making the shot. Like in archery, you can't hope you hit the vitals. You have to know you're going to hit the vitals. When you release that arrow, that arrow, you have to have fucking hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of training. If you're hoping, you're toast. Yeah, you're hoping you're fucked. Yeah. You're fucked. And it's like that with big waves. So for me, I was like, okay, I can hold my breath for five minutes and 34 seconds. So 25% of that, I can do that with a high heart rate. That's your record is 534. When those free divers get to like seven, eight minutes, what are they doing different? They just... Well, and I only did one three-day course of breath training or four-day course. So they teach you the science behind breath holding. And they help you with things to think about to get your static higher and higher and higher. Give us the cliff notes. Essentially, they have you hold your breath right at the start, see what your static breath hold is. And then they teach you how to hold it for longer. And so it's almost like meditation. For me, you basically think of... You don't think of time. You don't count the seconds. You think about things that have... For me, it was like, they were like, hey, think about something that's super detailed and go through that process while you're holding your breath. So I was in the pool and a guy's timing me and I'm in a wetsuit and I go underwater and I packed my bags to go hunting on Lanai. Oh. Yeah. And I was like, okay. So I started holding my breath and went underwater and I was like, okay, what do I need for my hunting trip on Lanai? I need how many arrows do I need? Three dozen. And then I was like, okay, I got my broad heads. Then I got to get my boots. Okay. Now I got to get my waterproof boots and I got my sneaking shoes. What socks do I need? Like super detailed, super boring stuff that you know really well. And I went through that whole packing thing. And then I literally got in my truck in my mind, drove down to the airport, got on the plane, flew there, got off the plane. It was like all this stuff was happening and then I didn't know how much time it passed. And then you have that involuntary urge to breathe. Have you ever held your breath for a long time and all of a sudden you go, your stomach starts doing this thing where it's like telling your brain, you need to breathe now or else you're going to die. It's not true. When you do these breath holding classes, it's really neat because they tell you like when that urge to breathe, that tells you you need to breathe right now or you're going to blackout or die or whatever it is, especially if you're underwater, it's really scary. And so they teach you to go, okay, you need to hold through these big contractions. And so like these contractions are happening and you're not paying attention to them when you're like in this meditative type of mindset. And that's how you can hold your breath for a super long time. So when you go through them, does it ever get easier when you hit those things or is it just something you learn how to deal with? It's super uncomfortable, right? And so you learn to deal with it. You learn to go, okay, this is totally normal. I know I can hold through multiple minutes of these contractions. This urge. Yeah. So then you end up like not even paying attention to them. Really? Yeah. But you need to at the end because you get really like spacey and relaxed, like super in this meditative state to where like at the end, because they start speeding up, those contractions start speeding up. And when they get to a certain, when they get to a certain, you know, when they start happening fast enough, you black out. So when I was doing this underwater training, you know, you do it with a partner. There's a guy watching you all the time. So you don't have a shallow water blackout and you don't drown. Jesus. Yeah.