Transcript
WEBVTT
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Hi friends.
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Today, bringing you a story from the other side of the country.
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And meeting a surfing athlete with roots in Florida.
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But with the story, like no other.
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A story of talent.
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Adventure.
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Followed by near death And drug addiction.
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But then resurrection To meet and exceed all expectations.
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This is the ageless athlete podcast.
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And I'm your host Kush canoed wall from San Francisco.
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If you have enjoyed the show.
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Great.
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If you could follow us and leave a review.
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On April 11th, 2009.
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Tyler Farnham a budding young surfer and lifeguard.
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Suffered a catastrophic skydiving accident.
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He almost died, broke all bones in his body and had his leg nearly amputated.
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In the months that followed, he reached an all time low with his mouth wide shut casts all over his body and needing assistance to perform the most basic functions.
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While recovering from the trauma.
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The pain post accident pushed Tyler into the seductive clutches of pain killing opioids.
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For the second time around, he almost went down with little hope of coming back.
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However with steely resolve.
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He battled back his demons.
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Found healing in the ocean.
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He loved.
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And today he's surfing tall as a coach and motivation speaker.
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Tyler's journey of broken bones, broken spirit.
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Perseverance is sure to leave you inspired.
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And believe.
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Anything is possible.
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So listen on for this.
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hell and back story of this ageless Waterman.
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Tyler, hi, how are you?
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where you?
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I'm in Cocoa Beach, Florida in the good old USA.
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It's been several years since we surfed together in Lombok in Indonesia.
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Yes, really good memories of that place.
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And funny enough, I actually lived in a small town by cocoa beach when I was in grad school in Florida.
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In Melbourne.
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Florida.
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Right next to you.
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And then I remember visiting Cocoa beach a couple of times.
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Lovely place.
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Tyler would love to get a quick bio of yourself.
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When I met you in Bali.
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You were helping run the surf school.
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And not you're in cocoa beach.
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Would love to hear a little bit about, uh, how old are you where you from?
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What are you doing these days?
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And then finally, what pulls you into your extraordinary life as a surfer and as a surfguard?
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I am literally at the moment sitting in my house where I was hometown, born and raised, Cocoa Beach, Florida.
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So across the street I've got the beach where I learned to surf when I was three.
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And yeah, my life started out here.
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Had a pretty I'd say picture perfect lifestyle with my sister growing up with our two dogs and surfing, going to school here.
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And, yeah, so I'd say my mid twenties, that's when my life started, I guess you could say becoming interesting.
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I started lifeguarding when I was 24, and as you know, I told you about my accident.
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So when I was 25 years old, I had my skydiving accident that nearly took my life.
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And that was the big catalyst of change for me because before that I was going, okay, I'm a lifeguard captain out on the beach and life was going extremely smooth.
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Whereas at the same time I, yeah, I knew I was going to probably go into fire school and become a firefighter.
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And when I had my accident, that's when my whole attitude changed and it was more of, okay, well, I want to live my life to the absolute fullest.
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And I loved my job as an ocean rescue lifeguard, but I had an opportunity.
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To go out and lifeguard out in Australia.
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And I took that opportunity when I was 29 years old.
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So I left my hometown when I was 29, went to Australia, did a season lifeguarding out there, and that went into a season lifeguarding out in New Zealand.
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And from there I went to Indonesia and I spent about nine years out there, surf coaching, surf guiding, and that's where we met in beautiful Lombok.
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Cocoa Beach surfer, influenced by the movie Point Break at a young age, started jumping out of planes at 18, riding dirt bikes, skateboarding, surfing, and yeah, the accident slowed me down and took away a couple of my hobbies, but to be honest with you, I still say, even with pain in my legs right now, I still say it's the best thing that's ever happened to me because it gave me the, life that I feel like just Went by in the snap of the fingers all my 30s basically I get in the ocean still every single day at 40 years old, I'm a huge advocate of surfing therapy and ocean therapy, just in general, the healing powers of being out the salt water on our skin, I'm a full advocate of just healing through Mother Nature, whether it be rock climbing or skiing or surfing, when you're just in tune with nature and you got, you get that mindset and that flow state and it's something that you become addicted to.
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And it's still something I, yeah, I'm, I'm always doing.
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I'm still out in that ocean every single day.
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I think the key word you used it's therapy.
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It's outdoor therapy served to us by the biggest creator of the mall.
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Modern nature.
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And we are so lucky to have.
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To be able to partake in it.
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I want to take a step.
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And just talk about how you got into surfing.
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And then into skydiving.
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Believe it or not.
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I actually have battled out at cocoa beach.
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It was a few years ago, I think a couple of years.
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Pre COVID.
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I had got down to Florida for a wedding.
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May I have with my buddy, Chris who's from Florida.
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We rented a formboard from.
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Long Johns iconic soul shop.
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It for super-small.
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Battled out and got a few.
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And I can actually say that I have served in the sunshine state.
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On that note, a.
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Wondering if you ever had the occasion to surf with the most famous surfer.
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To have come out of Florida, maybe all.
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The U S.
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Mr.
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Kelly Slater.
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yep.
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I've never actually surfed with Mr.
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Slater, but I've lifeguarded a couple of his events.
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There's a Slater Invitational that happens here.
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I don't know if it still happens, but before I left to go to Australia, they had it.
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And I remember I was lifeguarding that event and I had him sign my lifeguard can.
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we have a statue of him right in downtown.
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There's a street.
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Named after him Slater Way he's got an incredible story growing up here reasons why he surfed for me my dad actually taught me when I was three I always thank him for basically I say my mom gave me birth and my dad gave me the gift of surfing because when he taught me to surf that's when I'd get to see people of all ages when I'd surf coach In Bali and Lombok, I'd see them get bit by that surfing bug and I'd see them change and I was like that happened to me when I was really young and there's been times where I've taken that for granted I think over the years but I'd say over the past five years I've just been back to a three year old just gung ho I have to get in the ocean every day if I don't get in the ocean I almost feel like a little bit grumpy Skateboarding actually took over from surfing for quite some time because it's funny You said you surfed out here in Florida and I say, okay, how are the waves?
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They were small, right?
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Yeah.
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they were small and actually, not to interject, but, Kelly learned how to surf at Cocoa beach and obviously we know, and then I saw you surf and you are such a good surfer.
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So I think there's another like proof point that one can learn surfing with tiny waves as long as you supplement with things such as skateboarding, right?
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Yeah, for sure.
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So skating was a way of going and it was funny cause I had groups of friends as we all do in high school.
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And I had my group of buddies that surfed and I had my group of buddies that skated, but especially summertime, the waves are extremely flat and we still wanted to have fun.
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And so we'd go, we'd have our, one of our moms would drive us to say Melbourne or Coco and we'd go out to the colleges out there and we'd skate.
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Yeah.
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Where there are staircases and handrails and so we got heavy into skateboarding a few of us And I think for me it was like between 12 and 16.
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All I really did was skate I gave up surfing and I got pretty good and so did one of my really good friends that kept skating With me and then I stopped skating when I was about 16 because I was getting hurt too much funny I didn't break any bones, but Between sprains and dings in my shin and, spraining my wrists.
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then when I turned 18, that's when I jumped out of an airplane for the first time.
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that's similar to being three years old and surfing for the first time and getting bit by the bug.
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This time around, it was jumping out of a plane.
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And I still remember on the ride.
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down.
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I was talking to my instructor.
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I was like, how do I do this on my own?
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I want to do this on my own.
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So then I ended up taking the accelerated free fall course when I was still 18 when I took it and yeah, I had about seven years in the sport of skydiving.
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I was not a, I can't even say I was a weekend warrior.
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I was more of like once a month I'd go down.
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I'd maybe do two or three jumps every now and then I'd do it a every couple of weeks, but.
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I think I had under 200 jumps in seven years.
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Although that wasn't enough for me.
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It was just more of just going and getting that nice thrill, that buzz.
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And, yeah.
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Surfing was always number one for me, but we're not really getting that much swell here in Florida.
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We never really have.
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It's got that reputation in the surfing world.
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So I was like, okay, what else can I do to get my buzz here?
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sky diving was definitely, yeah, that was my go to for a while.
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So yeah, surfing, skating, skydiving.
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I tried my luck with riding dirt bikes, but I knew for me, I was like what I wanted to do was the stuff that would have killed me.
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It was like Brian Deegan watching the, I can't remember some of the names now, but the guys that were doing like the double backflips and just going huge.
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I thought that it looked so fun, but I was like, you got to pay your dues.
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In that kind of a sport now, it's if you don't grow up doing it, paying those dues, it's yeah, it catches up to you when you get a bit older, so I figured that probably wasn't a good endeavor, so I never really got on the dirt bike train, it was more just surfing and scout diving.
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Falling on or crashing on concrete or asphalt.
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It's just a little bit less forgiving than doubling in water.
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That was some good self-awareness.
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And moving on to other things earlier, you hinted at this.
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But you have had an extra ordinary bat.
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Overcoming a possibly.
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Career ending, or maybe even a life ending accident, plus a very serious drug addiction.
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Would love to just run through what happened, how did it happen?
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And then your journey back to resecting your former self and exceeding it.
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Would love to hear.
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A little bit more about it.
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Basically, 25 years old, I was a lifeguarding captain, planned to join the fire department.
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Life was going good.
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I had a girlfriend that I was in love with and I had planned a skydive with my mom and skydive Sebastian the place where I'd always go and do jumps and Yeah, it was April 11th 2009 Easter Sunday And I did one jump before my mom went up to go and do a jump with me.
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My jump went great And when I went back up on the second load of the day to do a jump, my mom was in the plane and her best friend was there with her as well.
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They were both doing their first ever tandem skydives.
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I jumped out of the plane.
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I had a malfunction at a, Relatively low altitude.
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So I went into an uncontrollable spin where I should have.
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I always say I should have cut away and use my reserve parachute, although I failed to do I thought too much.
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I broke a couple of rules.
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I was not altitude aware and I didn't use the rule of twos when it comes to malfunctions.
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And I definitely got a lot of backlash from that, from the skydiving community, but I own it.
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I own up to it and yeah, the accident was extremely severe.
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My mom was actually on the ground with me when the helicopter landed to transport me.
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So she had to see my mangled body right in the field, but I landed in the field.
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I landed in the grass and not on the paved runway.
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which 100 percent saved my life, I caused an indentation, this is wild, but yeah, an indentation in the earth from where I hit, because I landed on my right side, so even now, all the teeth on my right side are gone, so I lost 9 teeth, I shattered my jaw, the condyle here, I fractured my mandible, fractured, dislocated my left condyle, I broke my upper and lower arm, so My right arm, my humerus, I shattered my right femur, and my leg nearly was amputated because I, it looked like a puzzle piece, the x ray of my right femur, left femur broken in half, fractured my skull.
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So I was wrecked.
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And yeah, from that point, so April 11th, the accident, I was in the hospital for about, I want to say 10 days to two weeks before I was sent to a rehab center.
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But in the rehab center, it was, I'd say it was worse than the hospital.
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Because I was confined to a wheelchair, I had my mouth, at that point I had to go in for a surgery, they wired my mouth shut, so at my lowest, physically, and maybe even mentally, my lowest was confined to a wheelchair, with permanent metal rods in my legs, my arm, my mouth wired shut, and I needed assistance to use the bathroom, get in and out of bed.
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And that was a, yeah, that was a wild ride standing in rehab.
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I went from one rehab to the next once I was able to be a little bit more weight bearing on my leg.
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And, yeah, then I got transferred home, but, so I turned 26 years old when I woke up from the coma.
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the accident was April 11th, I was in a five day medical induced coma, woke up, I was 26 years old when I woke up.
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April 16th.
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And in 11 months, it was March of 2010.
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That was when I got the doctor to sign off that I could go skydiving again.
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And it was also the same month where I passed my requalification because I was a lifeguard captain at the time of the accident.
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And I wanted nothing more than to get my job back, my life back.
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I was able to pass my run, pass my swim, got my job back, got off light duty, and I also got back out in the water and surfed again, and I remember my first wave, I cried.
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I didn't really do much, but I stood up, I did a little turn, and my buddies that were out there with me, they were all pretty emotional as well.
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So in 11 months, it was a, yeah, like a complete turnaround, okay, cool, I might have my life back.
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And on the first day back, this is one of the wildest things that happened, in my opinion, was the first day back with my feet in the sand, March 27th of 2010, myself and, another lifeguard captain, I was with Johnny, Johnny McCarthy.
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Him and I responded to a surfer that had broken his neck surfing.
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And one of our lifeguards pulled him in from the water.
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Johnny and I arrived and we performed CPR on this man.
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And we brought him back and we saved him.
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he went to the hospital.
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He was in the hospital for about nine days.
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And they had to take him off life support.
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But his family thanked us.
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I received lifeguard of the year that year, a valor award.
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And I started working with surfers for autism that same summer.
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So summer of 2010.
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And between Surfers for Autism and having that life saving rescue, those were two big events that happened that my uncle was just like, maybe you should start writing this down.
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You should start writing down these events that are happening because they're pretty special.
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And I had already started journaling when I was in rehab.
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I started journaling about my progress because I was given some really good advice by another extreme athlete, extreme sports athlete, Karina Holicum.
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We got in a real serious accident.
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She's the one that told me to start.
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writing things down, following the progress of what I could do.
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And I started journaling when I was in the hospital, and then once those events occurred, like surfer's I wrote them all down.
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The following year, 2011, we had Hurricane Bonnie, and our lifeguard association, we had so many rescues that year.
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all those things just snowballed, just these great, big life events that occurred, and Yeah, and that's when my mind started going towards, what else could I do in life besides just Become a firefighter and yeah, an email fell into my hands from the lifeguarding service of Western Australia detailing what it would take to go out and work with them for the summer.
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Tyler, sorry to, to interrupt, but, that is an incredible story of having that accident and, surviving it just barely.
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and then going through all the modalities of, of recovery, right back to the point where you were able to get your, your, yourself back in the water to doing the rescues.
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The recovery story is, is incredible.
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Any specific things that you wish to highlight, behaviors, maybe habits, maybe tools that, were, were critical.
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I think you mentioned journaling.
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I journal a little bit myself and I find that to be quite therapeutic.
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Any things that, maybe journaling, maybe other things that, you was talking about, which I think some of us who are also dealing with maybe things that are not as, as severe could, learn from.
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The couple things I didn't mention when that accident occurred was the girl I was seeing, who I used her for my motivation to get back for quite some time during those 11 months, because at that time in my life, I was still deeply in love with her, and I wanted to be able to surf with her again, I wanted to be able to go and spend quality time with her, so a woman, of course, was a big part of my motivation, and yeah, the other thing I didn't mention either, which was a big part of it, was the drugs I was prescribed, the Oxycontin, So now in the beginning, I always say in the beginning, they helped me tremendously to be able to push through the pain because I'd want to ride my bike, I'd want to swim, eventually I'd want to run, but with those permanent metal rods, it was painful.
00:19:11.280 --> 00:19:19.211
So I used them as a crutch, but then of course what happens is you start out using them as a crutch and then you become dependent.
00:19:19.711 --> 00:19:24.621
So when I found that I'd become dependent on them was around the same time that the girl left me.
00:19:25.121 --> 00:19:30.840
So something that I think all of us human beings can deal with or relate to, I should say, is heartbreak.
00:19:31.391 --> 00:19:56.645
and I always say, this girl, her and I are great friends now, great friends, but then to go through it during that time, I was devastated, I was shattered, so I had a heartbreak to deal with, and I had this opioid addiction to deal with, and journaling really was number one for me, journaling and staying focused on a passion, which for me, I say music, art, and surfing.
00:19:57.145 --> 00:19:59.125
If I put them in order, surfing, music, and art.
00:19:59.145 --> 00:20:03.915
For sure, those are my three passions that I make sure every single day I would do.
00:20:03.915 --> 00:20:21.395
I would draw, I would write, I would surf, and I would listen to my music, and I would just push through the hard days, and eventually when I stopped taking the medication, I basically had to cut ties with A large percentage of people that were in my life because they were all people that were using the medication too.
00:20:21.895 --> 00:20:28.445
So all of a sudden, if I'm the kind of, I was the one that could get the medication, right?
00:20:28.526 --> 00:20:30.976
of course, I was the one people were reaching out to.
00:20:31.026 --> 00:20:35.105
but yeah, once I didn't have the medication anymore, I told the doctor I didn't want to take it.
00:20:35.105 --> 00:20:41.836
that's when all of a sudden, I didn't really have to worry about those people anymore because I wasn't accessed to the drug.
00:20:41.836 --> 00:20:43.596
So for me, it was cutting off.
00:20:44.096 --> 00:20:53.375
Everybody in my life, for the most part, and then just one day at a time, one foot in front of the other, along with the journaling, and and that was the way I was able to heal.
00:20:53.916 --> 00:21:01.901
kudos and, gratitude to these habits and, skills that you had with art and the drawing that, helped you pull through.
00:21:01.901 --> 00:21:12.116
I I think one falls back on some of these, Fundamentals that give us joy and it's so nice when we have those things and the, the oxycontin, scourge is real.
00:21:12.307 --> 00:21:14.326
I read that book, about the Sacklers.
00:21:14.346 --> 00:21:15.277
it's pretty devastating.
00:21:15.277 --> 00:21:15.616
What's.
00:21:16.116 --> 00:21:29.277
What's that done to much of the country as a small side story a few months ago, I had a small trauma to my shoulder and, I undertook this therapy.
00:21:29.477 --> 00:21:30.906
It's called PRP, whatever.
00:21:30.906 --> 00:21:35.094
And, I had this sort of anti, anti reaction instead of relief.
00:21:35.173 --> 00:21:37.114
I had this, crazy, like pain episode.
00:21:37.614 --> 00:21:42.807
To the point where I had to get a fentanyl patch.
00:21:42.807 --> 00:21:44.717
fentanyl again is one of those crazy drugs.
00:21:45.047 --> 00:21:55.967
And I was so paranoid, I was like, on one side I was being wracked by this, this mind numbing pain, and on this other side I was like, oh goodness, I don't really want to get, this, drug that's killing people.
