Transcript
WEBVTT
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Friends welcome back to the issues athlete podcast, where we tap into secret and stories of each to find high performing athletes.
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Uh, rainy weekend here in San Francisco, and I enjoyed spending the day putting this episode together.
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Broken only by soggy walks outside with my dog.
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Roger.
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Once in a while you get exceedingly lucky and you get to meet your heroes.
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And poke them with defensible questions.
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Dr.
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Mark Raenuka is a legendary big wave surfer icon from San Francisco.
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I learned to surf in the breaks around the city, myself.
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And could barely contain my excitement when mark greet to meet with me.
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Mark is 70 years young.
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Started surfing at 11 and he has been exploring waves up and down the California coast for almost 60.
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Remarkable years.
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As a surf pioneer, mark holds many records to his name.
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But alongside he juggled a career as a medical doctor and advocate He was.
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Forcing foremost.
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Maybe the only person who have served.
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Hi, Mark.
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Good to have you here in person.
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Glad to be with you, Kush.
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Excellent.
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I see that it is nighttime, in San Francisco, uh, with fall approaching.
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you feel ready
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I was ready for this fall season, all through the summer, and just kept hoping to see the first glimpse of fall weather and fall swells, and truth be told, here we are, October 20th, and we've only had a glimmer just in the past two days.
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And otherwise it's, um, chalk it up up to global warming or what, but it's concerning.
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and the worst of it was that the water got so warm,
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Mm hmm.
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over 60 degrees here in San Francisco's beginning back in August.
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Um, and there's this plankton bloom we call the Red Tide and me and a lot of other surfers are intensely.
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Reactive to it, uh, allergic, and boy, you'll see any number of folks out of water with, um, any number of sort of sinus and nose and ear and eye problems.
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I saw a guy out in the water just two days ago.
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He had this goof, goofy apparatus.
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It was like a clip on his nostrils and he had some little thread or something that was going to keep this thing.
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Clipped onto his nose.
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And I said, is that because of the red tide?
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He goes, that's right.
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And I said, does that work?
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That thing you have on?
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And he said, I think it does.
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And I said, well, did you ever try just every time you're going to punch through or you're going to have your head underwater, just breathing out through your nostrils.
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And so the water can't come in.
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He said, Oh, uh, but at any rate, uh, Yeah, it's, it's, it's, uh, this is not beginning, um, in a really strongly positive way.
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Normally, by the end of September, we would have had a couple of days at Mavericks, a couple of solid double overhead days here at Ocean Beach, and instead, you know, yesterday, the day before, you know, maybe there was a handful of waves that were maybe double overhead and, but for the most part, not.
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It's still, you know, Was classically Ocean Beach.
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Like yesterday, four of us, four good friends all started paddling together up by Rivera.
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It was a 40 minute paddle out.
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And, you know, if one were counting how many times you had to throw your board away or dive under or duck dive or whatever.
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You know, it's in the hundreds.
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Uh, and one of the four didn't even make it.
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He finally just said, I'm out of here.
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And, uh, and you know what, of that whole session and the rides I got included, the most memorable part was the paddle out.
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And if you, if there's something sort of the great equalizer here at Ocean Beach, but also the bar that you have to keep yourself healthy and strong enough for.
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It's to paddle out.
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And even in the summer, it can be a rough paddle out, but, you know, famously at Ocean Beach, the fall winter is what brings so many surfers to their knees and they think they're the greatest surfer in the world.
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And they may well be.
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It doesn't mean that you're going to get out.
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And so you have to use a fair bit of cunning.
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One of the guys who I paddled out with, he is currently under treatment for an advanced melanoma
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Wow.
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and he made it out and, um, When we got out there, I sort of sort of jokingly sort of paddled up to him as if I was like a making a film from a drug company or something and wanted to know, you know, do I think that his, the drug that he's on, it's called Keytruda.
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Do I think that that contributed to his being able to get out?
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And he said, well, yes, I do think so.
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And we had sort of a joke about that, but I said, seriously, Tom, um, to get out on a day like today, or even on bigger days, it takes a certain willfulness.
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And do you feel that the will to get out on a day like today is somewhat similar to the will you've had to have?
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To go through the cancer treatments and he said, absolutely, absolutely.
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So it is, there is a parallelism.
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I think, um, he's somewhat unique really to Ocean Beach because most of the surfing world.
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There's nothing like this, you know, for, for me, always, it was easy to go to the North shore and you could, you could paddle out without getting your hair wet It's a whole different deal
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you know what, this is such an interesting, uh, subject that, uh, I've thought about a lot, in the last 10 years or so that I've been learning and surfing at Ocean Beach.
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Um, just so people understand where we are and what we do here, I would love to get a quick bio of yourself.
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Mark, how old are you?
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Where do you live?
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What do you do for work?
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yeah,
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And uh,
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Good enough.
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Good enough.
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So I'm 70 years old and I grew up in West Los Angeles and at age 11 with some friends, we did a junior lifeguard program right by Santa Monica pier.
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And that was when I first began surfing and I ended up, um, going to UC Santa Cruz as an undergrad and, uh, where I did my pre med and
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mhm,
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got into UC San Francisco here for medical school and that was in 1975 and was immediately astonished to see how big the surf was up here compared to Santa Cruz, which I thought was pretty big surf and, Once I'd gotten to Santa Cruz, I was never intending to ever go back to Southern California, which has generally pretty small and very crowded surf.
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And, you know, for me, it was like heaven to find San Francisco and all through medical school, I was never intending to even be a physician, really.
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I just wanted the education.
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I was more interested in actually the field of education.
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And through the passage of, uh, getting into medical school, I'd already been to like eight different colleges.
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Uh, or places of institutes, if you will, and had a number of important role models.
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Um, a guy named Gregory Bateson, who was a legendary cultural anthropologist, a guy named Ivan Illich, who was sort of a defrocked priest.
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Um, and both of them having great, I don't know, great inspiration for me in terms of education and the power of that.
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And I was intending to actually go and work with a guy named Paulo Freire, who
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mhm,
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This whole notion of critical consciousness and ways to sort of educate people.
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And so my dream always was to use medicine as a way to, um, create change
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mhm,
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rather than as it were to sort of dole out medicines or, or do operations or that kind of thing.
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And it just so happened that when I was finishing medical school, I had an experience on in family medicine with a guy named, uh, Ron Goldschmidt and through him began to learn about.
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This sort of the actual application of something I learned from Bateson in terms of, um, the work of Milton Erickson, who was a amazing based on, on change, a change agent, but using hypnosis, really, and, um, and I just loved what I was doing there.
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And that was at SF General.
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And I just, so I applied to residency.
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It's the only place I even applied in family medicine at SF General and did all that.
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And, uh, yeah.
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And when I finished, I was, I did inner city family medicine again, just sort of this whole idea of trying to work with people who, where you can really make profound change and along the way began realizing that it was advocacy that I was most interested in.
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And I started my own advocacy practice based on a television show of the time called the medical.
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I call it the medical equalizer, but there was a show called the equalizer.
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And it was made into movies and that kind of thing, but it was this idea of, you know, um, I'm going to say rescuing people, but pairing up with people to when they're feel like, uh, sort of everything is stacked against them.
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So I began doing that with patients who feel that the medical system had failed them utterly, or had given up on them, or were actually obstructionistic.
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And I devised a way of working with people never by zoom, uh, but by phone, this was way back before people even talked about telephone medicine as something you could do, but I began doing it, you know, in 1989, 90.
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And, um, part of the, the, the sort of benefits of that was that mostly the people I would be speaking with, they were from all around the country around the world.
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They'd find their way to me through an underground of people I'd already helped.
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Um, and.
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But they generally, the time to talk would be in the evening when they were done dealing with doctor appointments and whatever crazy stuff that they had to do with their lives.
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And also when more of their family members could be on the line and we would do like group calls.
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So I always, um, was protecting my time for surf and I never was in the closet about being a hardcore surfer and a big wave rider.
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And the patients loved that and it was fine with them if, if for whatever reason we did have a call set up and I needed to, because there was a big swell or I needed to go to surf a swell somewhere, they were fine with it.
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Okay, yeah, that's great.
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You go surf and, you know, let's reschedule it.
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It was never an issue.
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And, um, so I've been doing that work as the quote medical equalizer or what I call medical advocacy.
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I've been doing that for about 30 years and I have a house right here on the beach and next to the house is another house that I have for just an office to do this
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hmm.
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Sure.
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And I do a lot of teaching of medical advocacy to medical students and other physicians who want to study with me.
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Got it.
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Got it.
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Yeah.
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One of the things I wanted to, uh, explore a bit is how you've managed to, uh, organize your life so you can, uh, give surfing the time that surfing needs.
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As well as give your career the time that, uh, your patients and your profession needs.
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And I think I'm getting one clue right there, which is, which is the work you have done with, uh, patient advocacy and being able to, able to work with your patients to move times around.
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By, by sharing with, uh, your, uh, your clientele, your, uh, your, your, uh, other life, your passion for surfing, it sounds like, uh, sounds like there's been, uh, adequate empathy on, on that front.
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Uh, I'm curious, um, you know, now we have enough media out there and people see, uh, maybe people see surfing of all types.
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But generally when I have talked about surfing, even in the last dozen years that I've been surfing, people's impressions of surf are still kind of locked into what they might have seen from movies, the, image of that surfer and, Waikiki beach in Hawaii, on a perfectly, beautiful day.
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Have you been?
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Able to communicate how, surfing in San Francisco might be a bit different than, uh, the popular stereotype.
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that's one.
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The second how would you describe Mark to the average person, how that is different?
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What makes, uh, surfing in San Francisco, interesting and, and different
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So to the first question, there really isn't, when you're talking about stereotypes, it's usually maybe the stereotype that you hold yourself as virtually a chip on your own shoulder.
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And I've seen far too many professionals, lawyers, physicians, physicists, who, because they were a surfer, they were literally in the closet or slightly ashamed of it, even.
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And.
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So, um, In the same way that people have stereotypes, perhaps about what a physician should be, you know, in a white coat and like something that you saw, you see on television or in a movie, but in truth, the same diversity that you'll see in medicine, you'll see in surfing.
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And yeah, there really are some stereotypes.
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Typical characters who become that way.
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Largely, they're the high visibility ones who are sponsored surfers who, you know, they're just, they've got a gig and they got to perform and go to work and, um, present whatever is the company's, uh, what they're trying to sell.
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And I've, uh, developed literally a.
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Almost an anaphylaxis to those characters.
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I mean, I, you know, through these years of sort of combining medicine and surfing, I've gotten to know kind of most of the, you know, the name people in the surfing world.
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And some of them are fantastic.
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And some of them, they're just doing it for a paycheck.
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And, and some of them hardly seem to enjoy surfing.
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Um, and then they love to be when, uh, they can be a free surfer, they call it.
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And I remember one famous guy who said, he said, Well, now my sponsors are letting me be a free surfer.
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And I said, Do you see the contradiction of what you're saying?
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They're letting you be a free surfer?
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What's that about?
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So, um, the unique thing in San Francisco is that if you love, I don't mean to be pretentious, but if you love culture, that usually means being close to a city.
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And, you know, I have A great affinity for jazz.
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I love seeing live jazz and I must go to two or three shows a month and have for a long time and I, and I thrive on, on movies.
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I see a lot of movies.
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And in terms of keeping the balance, I remember I used to have an index of, I'd go down in the San Francisco Chronicle, they don't even have these lists anymore, but it'd be all the theaters and what they're showing, and I would do a tally of how many of the movies I'd seen.
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And I decided that if I hadn't seen at least 20 of the movies, and the total number would average around, in town there might be a total of about 70, 75 movies, but if I hadn't seen at least 20 of them, it meant that I was working too hard.
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Then the other me, the other measure I, I began to use was, yeah, you know, you can make money in medicine for sure.
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There's, you know, you can take on more gigs and push for, you know, charging more and all that kind of thing.
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But what I came to realize was the real power is you in terms of buying free time.
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In other words that I have, it's, I'm lucky to be a physician and I can make a lot of money if I need to, but it also means I can create.
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A lot of free time and so I've set it up so that I don't generally ever have an appointment before about 5 PM and because the summer surface so crappy here.
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I will, you know, do more work during the day and more appointments during the day and I just work a lot more hours and then I literally downshift in my schedule big time starting right around now and I'll keep that up through the big wave season which for us goes right through February.
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it sounds like you've been able to create that schedule and hone it over the years to where you kind of have.
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Some you have that, balance and the flexibility.
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yeah, curious, um, to the layperson, how would you, uh, how would you describe or compare, CF and disco surf to maybe other kinds of surf?
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And I'm not, I'm not trying to put all other kinds of surf in one bucket, but if you were to, to make that distinction, how would you go about it?
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you know, some people approach surfing from a quantitative perspective, how many waves they can catch.
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for instance, uh, surfing in San Francisco is more of a qualitative experience.
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And big wave surfing in general is more of a qualitative experience.
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So that, you know, on a big day out here in San Francisco, A, you feel Like you've accomplished a lot just having made it outside and be if you end up catching more than two or three waves That's you caught a lot of waves that day.
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And so a lot of people who would stand and watch surfers for instance You know, they're sort of puzzle how little time we actually spend riding waves, but how much time we have to spend Sort of working out all the angles as it were to figure out where to sit and where to take off and how not to wipe out and And the higher you go up the ladder of big wave surfing, always the fewer the waves you'll be catching.
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So on big days at Mavericks, uh, you know, Mavericks doesn't even start breaking until it's at least triple overhead.
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So let's say 15, 18 foot faces, um, you know, very few people catch many waves.
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Even when, even when there's nobody out, I mean, you know, I surf a lot by myself at Mavericks included.
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And, um, yeah, you, you're not.
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You're not doing it for how many you catch and you might even be out there for three or four hours and catch one wave.
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And from a sort of a spiritual tradition, um, it's just about perfect.
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What makes it perfect?
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It's, it's the oneness of it.
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It's the, um, the fact that you have, you have, you, you imagine that you have some measure of control over it all, but for the most part, you don't, other than by your own experience and fitness and cunning.
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And a lot of it is cunning.
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But having to put aside, it's like people who now will say, well, I'm done with this COVID pandemic.
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I'm just going to live my life regularly.
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The foolishness of that, to imagine that you can proclaim that and that there's any reality to that.
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And the same with somebody who's going to like conquer the surf or, you know, take surf lessons.
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And then I got a coach and then I got, and then they, you know, this and that and blah, blah, blah, blah.
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And we watch these people come to Mavericks thinking they're these conquering heroes because they've done that elsewhere and maybe in other aspects of their life.
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And they're just reduced to rubble.
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Sure, Mark, how long have you been surfing Ocean Beach and Mavericks?
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And maybe if you can just give a quick idea of how you've seen the surf culture, uh, evolve over that time?
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So I started when I came up here to start medical school, and I was looking around for a place to live.
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And it was, you know, offshore it's this time of year and sunny and they were good surf and there was nobody else even in the water and I was getting some great waves and there was one guy who weighs up the beach and I paddled up to where he was and said, you know, what do you call this spot right here?
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And he said, Oh, this is called pillbox and that's called purple cow.
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And he's all these things he starts saying, he goes, are you new here?
00:22:24.973 --> 00:22:27.913
And I said, yeah, I just moved up here to start medical school.
00:22:28.263 --> 00:22:31.074
And he paddled over right up next to me and he put out his hand.
00:22:31.528 --> 00:22:48.808
And he said, Dan suey third year and so, uh, and I, so it was like, yeah, that was more important than any white coat ceremony sort of for the initiation of becoming sort of in this, uh, this group and right away.
00:22:48.808 --> 00:22:51.298
I all the surfboards I'd had from.
00:22:52.284 --> 00:22:56.584
You know, LA area and Santa Cruz were useless up here.
00:22:56.733 --> 00:23:04.384
And I gradually began to realize I had to get bigger guns, bigger, longer boards, which you couldn't even get here.
00:23:04.503 --> 00:23:05.223
I mean, there weren't.
00:23:05.683 --> 00:23:08.913
Shapers for the most part, and even in Santa Cruz, they didn't have big boards.
00:23:09.304 --> 00:23:21.364
So for whatever reason, I began going to the North Shore when the surf here would get crappy, which is usually in February, and there they'd still have big waves, and most of the pros had left town, and they often would leave behind their big guns.
00:23:21.923 --> 00:23:26.294
So I would just buy a pile of them and fly them back home, five or six boards even.
00:23:27.094 --> 00:23:34.594
And the problem here was, um, we were just breaking boards all the time because of how powerful the surf is.
00:23:35.124 --> 00:23:37.733
And also is when leases were really pretty primitive.
00:23:37.773 --> 00:23:41.071
I mean, the leases would just break willy nilly.
00:23:41.430 --> 00:23:48.630
my goal was really to surf a place that breaks about three to four miles out called the potato patch.
00:23:49.234 --> 00:23:56.694
Which I had seen the first time I, in anatomy lab on the 14th floor of the medical school, you could see the potato patch breaking.
00:23:56.744 --> 00:23:57.994
It would just blow my mind.
00:23:58.085 --> 00:24:01.994
And these were waves that were 50 foot faces, something like that.
00:24:02.085 --> 00:24:06.724
I mean, really, and some of the waves would, would go on for like a minute.
00:24:07.684 --> 00:24:09.265
And, um, so
00:24:09.339 --> 00:24:10.144
And, And, Mark.
00:24:10.144 --> 00:24:15.904
This is just, if you don't mind describing this place, it's, it's a fascinating, uh, natural phenomena, right?
00:24:16.134 --> 00:24:18.174
Believe It's outside the Golden Gate Bridge.
00:24:18.494 --> 00:24:48.105
if you just think of like a river mouth, where the sand is, comes out the river and deposits sandbars, that's really what San Francisco Bay is, it's this one big river mouth and all the sand goes out and in a horseshoe crown that stretches from the north on the rune side all the way down here, comes in kind of closer here, down by Tarabel Street, And, um, and on the outer realm of it is where the shipping channel has to be dredged to for the big ships to come in.
00:24:48.489 --> 00:24:49.858
it's about four fathoms deep.
00:24:49.858 --> 00:24:53.229
So about 24 feet deep and the only way to access it.
00:24:53.358 --> 00:25:02.898
Originally, I tried with my friend who had a power boat and I ended up worrying more about the guy in the boat and then I just, I didn't like doing that.
00:25:02.898 --> 00:25:06.021
And, so then I just began trying to paddle out to it.
00:25:06.339 --> 00:25:14.069
And after a number of experiments figured out that on an outgoing tide, I could just jump in up by the cliff house.
00:25:14.569 --> 00:25:19.410
And literally ride the current all the way out without paddling, even it was hilarious.
00:25:19.410 --> 00:25:23.319
You could just sit on your board and it just takes you two to three knots an hour.
00:25:23.319 --> 00:25:24.890
I mean, it was, it was easy.
00:25:24.890 --> 00:25:29.750
You just had to time it for when the tide stopped outgoing because otherwise you couldn't stay in position out there.
00:25:30.599 --> 00:25:40.849
But on some of those days where I wouldn't even catch a wave, you know, I might have literally paddled or covered maybe 10 or 12 miles.
00:25:41.349 --> 00:25:42.490
And I always liked paddling.
00:25:43.130 --> 00:26:00.690
Paddling seemed to me a delight and sometimes, you know, the current would help too, but, and then finally, um, and I would do this with friends in the, in the beginning, and again, I hate to say this, but they would kind of chicken out or lose heart or, you know, and I would say, no, no, we got to get about another mile or two further out.
00:26:00.779 --> 00:26:02.259
We're just on the inside here.
00:26:02.599 --> 00:26:04.359
And they would go, no, I don't know.
00:26:04.359 --> 00:26:08.744
And then the Coast Guard would send out one of their rescue boats because there was some reports and, I don't know.
00:26:09.265 --> 00:26:16.384
They'd, they'd, those guys, you've seen them on the big days where they bust through the waves and make a quite a, quite a show for people.
00:26:16.394 --> 00:26:19.434
But, and then they would, they would look over and they'd go, Oh, it's you doc.
00:26:19.474 --> 00:26:20.204
Oh, okay.
