The Lifestyle of a Surfing Legend

"I think the key to happiness is maximizing each day. So if you're unhappy,
here's a simple prescription: Live harder." -Laird Hamilton 

Laird Hamilton. Lance Armstrong. Micheal Jordan. See where I'm going with this? These men are sports icons. They have accomplished more than most men dream and have pushed the boundaries of sport in ways unimaginable. To many they are heroes and to all they are legends. But only one of them has a self-help book.

That book is Force of Nature, an examination of Laird Hamilton's success in surfing and in life. It breaks things down into four sections, Mind, Body, Soul, and Surfing, going into detail about his diet, training, social life, purpose, attitude, goal-setting, etc. in order to decode how and why Laird Hamilton became the surfing phenom that he is today.

And get this. He doesn't know it, but Laird Hamilton is living an ancestral lifestyle, one that is admirably close to nature in almost every way. In fact, Hamilton's lifestyle is an ideal example for all of us.

In the nutrition section, he praises organic, free-range beef as his number 1 favorite food. He explains that it's superior even to grass-fed beef, saying, "The closer to the wild, the better." He then goes on to sing the praises of raw seafood, seaweed, coconut oil, and raw butter from the milk of grass-fed cows. He extols the virtue of eating "real food from the earth" and warns readers to "beware of any 'food' that has been created by humans rather than nature." Sound familiar?

On a short list of the four foods he avoids, the first is bread, the second is pizza, and the third is soda. (The fourth on the list was cheese, but then he includes it later in grocery lists and dishes and admits that he prefers raw cheese...I'm not sure why he included it here with the others. This list should have been the 3 foods he avoids, given how he and the publisher/editor looked rather favorably on the right kinds of cheeses.)

Hamilton's training routine focuses on functional fitness. He writes, "It's not how much weight you can lift, it's how much strength you can incorporate into your movements. You want strength that you can actually control and apply." He also advocates changing up your routine and working on balance. These ideas are central to the programming you see in the world of ancestral health, where movements are based on natural patterns and skill-building.

Hamilton is also big on going barefoot:

"As many runners are discovering, shoes can actually decondition feet. That weakness leads to decreased performance and increased injury, which is why many athletes are now incorporating barefoot training into their workouts. 

I go barefoot whenever I can. When I surf, I'm using every last muscle, ligament, and tendon down there. There's a matrix of tiny muscles between the sole and ankle that most people aren't even aware of. I need them. I need my feet and toes to be able to dig in; to be sensitive, flexible, strong, and resilient. I don't need them to be trussed up and immobile--ever...Anyone who's ever walked barefoot through warm sand or cool grass knows that feeling the earth through your soles is one of life's great joys." 

The book also slights mainstream advice. In a brief cameo by trainer and educator Paul Chek of the Corrective Holistic Exercise Kinesiology Institute, Chek writes, "I'm constantly amazed -- perplexed, actually -- at how all these people with master's degrees and PhDs in health and medicine can't even keep themselves healthy. They don't eat right, and they don't know how to take care of themselves. Some of the sickest people in the world are at nutrition conferences. Blows my mind." While knowing health and practicing health are two separate things for many health professionals due to the demands of their education and careers, I certainly agree that conventional health authorities may not be the ideal place for people seeking to optimize their health. The purpose of medicine, after all, is to make sick people better. And the purpose of nutrition is to reasonably sustain the Average Joe. Neither of these seek optimization.

This book is good for its simple, fad-free accessibility, built only on the popular brand of Laird Hamilton himself. It's something that anyone can pick up and respect. And the fact that it's so in line with an evolutionary perspective, without ever saying so, means winning my endorsement. Hamilton is a strong example of the ancestral lifestyle, so immersed in nature, that he makes me feel like a slacker.

While the book has some minor problems, I would recommend it to anyone for the quality advice and the cogent way it captures all the elements of health and well-being within an overall lifestyle. Here, it's presented as a surfing lifestyle -- but I like to see it as one very close to nature. In evolutionary terms.

"I may be an extreme case, but we all need to take risks. I think it goes back to our primitive state, our deepest DNA, when we were hunters and had to avoid getting eaten by large animals. Survival meant risk. The thirst for adventure is part of human nature. It's in every cell of our bodies."- Laird Hamilton

Rethinking Patriarchal Ideals in the Sexual Division of Labor

Man the hunter. It's a phrase burned into the cultural consciousness of our time. It ushers in conceptions of virility and male prowess. And, for some men, it provides an ancient justification for the sacred, central duty of manhood: to provide.

It's well-known in anthropology that males were the designated 'hunters' of the tribe. Women helped out to some degree with small game and insects, securing their role in hunting, but it was the men who felled the mightiest beasts. As Richard Leakey writes,

“The loss of the child to the hungry jaws of a carnivorous cat would be a serious blow to a woman's reproductive career. To put the child at risk would therefore not be biologically sensible, either for the woman or her mate... for these and other reasons, women only rarely hunt.” 

So hunting was indeed the work of men. Many early anthropological ideas and popular ideas today point to this particular gender role leading to power in the social group, since food won hunting was a form of resources.

In academia there lives a valid rebuttal to this idea, that the 'man the hunter' concept is simply fueling patriarchal ideals by highlighting the male penchant for resource acquisition in the ancestral environment. This rebuttal is summed up in The Gathering Hypothesis, which states that women played an important role in resource acquisition too, because women gathered. Proponents of this hypothesis posit that 'man the hunter' glorifies male contributions while belittling female ones (1).

Food was certainly a resource, but was hunting a road to power? We know that early human tribal formations were surprisingly egalitarian among its members, both among men (2) and between men and women (3). Whether hunting back then was glorified business, we can only guess.

Of course, the feminist critique is highlighting the modern patriarchal view that honors male contribution by glorifying the gender role of hunting.

To unravel this assertion, consider the lion, where females do the hunting -- and nearly everything else -- leaving the males with little responsibility. To boot, after females lions have made a kill, sometimes the male takes the carcass, rarely sharing with the lionesses that did all the hard work. To many, this is clearly unfair and even demeaning that the females must take on an unequal burden of responsibility.

The lion represents a phenomenon in nature that can only truly be understood by evolution and the ethological pressures that govern the sexual division of labor. Lion prides usually have but one male, who protects the pride from other males. This leads to females hunting together cooperatively in order to feed their cubs. Physically, the females are more capable hunters. Together, these facts dictate how and why females are the ones who do the dangerous work of bringing down prey.

In this objective context, is there really anything apparently glorious about hunting? Do we see the females or the males as the ones with power in this scenario?

It appears that males in the lion kingdom have retained a lazy kingship, one enabled by domination and monopoly. Their physical dominance allows them to take from the females. And with only one male around, the females have little choice but to concede to his rule. In this environment, the situational pressures dictate the females as the unlucky ones who are left to do the hard work of providing food for their pride in addition to birthing and rearing young.

In this light, hunting, as the anthro-feminists rightly point out, may not simply be a glorified acquisition of resources. Nor is it necessarily one that leads to power. Instead, is it possible that hunting can be seen as the lowly work performed by the less fortunate gender -- a natural consequence of the species' evolved traits, environment, and social formation?

Human social formations are far different from those of lions. In humans, it is the males who hunt, despite their physical dominance. There are equal numbers of males and females within a tribe, providing a different dynamic for the sexual division of labor. If women primarily gather food and take care of the children, and men go off on long hunting journeys, then which gender seems to have the favorable position in this social formation? Can a favorable position in the social formation predict that gender's power?

Men evolved to hunt for various reasons. Physically, they are more capable hunters. There are social rewards for providing food. Hunting is a useful arena where men compete for status and simultaneously cooperate for survival. Like lions, humans were required to hunt in order to survive.

Men today find joy and meaning in the hunt, but this does not discount the objective role of hunting in a natural social formation. Evolution teaches us that mechanisms must have arisen that supported males in hunting, such as the evolved traits of pride, status seeking, or a thirst for adventure, even glory. These traits, which are the basis for the meaning and joy that men today find in the hunt, only confirm the evolutionary perspective.

It's an open question: are hunting males the lowly workhorses, or the glorious breadwinners we revere? Can objectivity exist in a realm so ancient, sacred, and primal?



SOURCES

1. Buss, David. Evolutionary Psychology: the New Science of the Mind. Pearson, 2008
2. Boehm, Christopher. Hierarchy in the Forest: the Evolution of Egalitarinism. Harvard, 2001.
3. Gowdy, John. Limited Wants, Unlimited Means: a reader on Hunter-Gatherer Economics and the Environment. Island Press, 1997.

A Book by Yours Truly

Just a sliver of the mountain of evolutionary literature.

I can't help but feel a sense of serendipity about the course of my life as of late. Everything seems to have aligned in just the right way. I've been given the chance to become a part of something bigger than myself, something with the potential to really help others, and, hence, something rife with purpose and meaning. I am, of course, referring to my book about the growing movement called ancestral health.

Years ago, I stumbled on this idea that evolution had answers for societal problems. It enveloped me. Little did I know at the time that the rabbit hole went deep, but I nevertheless scoured the topic voraciously. I read everything I could, interpreted every idea, and talked to anyone who would listen. For years I did this.

Then I reached a tipping point. I had put in my 10,000 hours, so to speak, and I felt hungry for more. I was ready to take the next step, to 'go pro', as they say. Luckily, my passion aligned neatly with circumstances that enabled me to write the book and become a bona fide entrepreneur.

When I discovered ancestral health, it had no name. It was just a sloppy idea thrown around with words like 'paleo'. But I latched on, framing the ideas within evolutionary theory. I learned about diet, then exercise, then sleep, and there is where the road began to fade and split. Ancestral health still had so far to go, but the rest of the way had yet to be paved. There was still important work to be done in educating others and expanding the lens of evolution. I realized that I just might be the man for the job.

This is what drove me to write the book. I wanted to unite the ideas before me and expand them into a cohesive format to present to people. I wanted something that someone could pick up and go, "Wow, evolution makes sense of everything." I wanted a strong brand free from the caveman gimmicks. I wanted to wrap everything up in a neat little bow and give it to the world. So that's my challenge, my dutiful project, what will be my greatest achievement. I just hope you like it.