Bleed, Sweat, Cry, but also Dance

One thing about winning gold I don't hear a lot about but think about a lot.

When I think back to meeting Caroline Marks, the first thing I remember striking me was how much she laughed. Everything was sick and gnarly and radical and all of it was said with a big, open-mouth, eyes-squintin’ smile. It’s easy to be that way when you’re winning and she had just won the world title a few months before my visit to her adopted hometown of San Clemente, California. She also just won Olympic gold this week so she’s smiling even more now, somehow. But before winning the world title last fall and in the year or two even before that, she’d lost all of that, forgotten how to feel that way, forgotten how to be that way. She had to remember before she could win again.

What plays best for sports fans and sponsors and coaches and people who cut them their paychecks is the serious ways great athletes do combat with the suck. Training hard, cold plunges, hot saunas, more training hard, blood and sweat and tears. Hell, my opening scene for the Sports Illustrated profile I wrote about Marks starts with blood running from her ears. Blood makes for good, dramatic narratives.

And no doubt, all that matters too. That’s how you cut through the stuff holding you back. Sometimes you just gotta bleed. And there’s something transcendent about performing through such pain. Marks went to a hospital, the doctor there told her to cut her season short so she could have surgery to heal the infection and other issues with her sinuses, Marks said no fucking way, then went back out there and spent the new few months winning herself that world title.

There’s this intensity all greats carry with them in their craft and in witnessing it we get a look at some real human strength.

There’s more to human strength than enduring blood and pain, but getting to a place of seeing that can take some doing, especially for people who’ve gotten great at something. Often people great at something are great because some part of them is throwing itself all into that thing because they’ve got a lot of pain they need to get away from. And this thing — in Marks’s case, surfing — takes them away from whatever’s hurting. But only for so long.

Because that pain is in all of us. Life’s bitched like that. At least, that’s one perspective. We’re all born destined to grow up hurting from one thing or another and some of us feel that pain stronger. The real fucked-up thing about feeling pain stronger is that just as strong comes the urge to get away from that pain, and it’s in the choice of what takes you from that pain that makes or breaks you. Although no matter how healthy your choice, the pain always wins at some point.

We all break eventually. And usually it’s the unhealthy choices that finally get us to that breaking point, even if it’s just an addiction to hating some part of ourself. Usually, that’s the thing underneath it all, anyway.

That’s what happened to Marks.

Same for Shaun White, who I met in 2017 for a profile that ran in January 2018 as he was attempting to win Olympic gold again after failing to medal in Sochi in 2014, who told me he was trying to learn the hardest trick he’d ever had to learn in his life: how to be happy. “It sounds like such a blatant thing,” he told me back then. “And it’s so hard.”

Same for Kelly Slater, who I profiled in 2022 after he won the Super Bowl of surfing at 50 years old, who told me that within a year or so after winning his first world title some 30 years prior, he stood on the top of a building in Coolangatta and walked to the edge of it and took a breathtaking view and thought about jumping. “Just looking down . . . like this would all be over in a few seconds,” he told me. “That’s where my mind was. . . . I was suicidal for a minute.”

Same for me.

*

My marriage began crumbling a long time before we decided to separate in 2018. While of course I can blame other people, I also struggle a lot with blaming myself more than anyone else, especially when other people have different versions of stories that happened than what I experienced.

There have been moments when my chest ached with physical pain. It was a familiar feeling, one I’d had for much of my life, but compounded now, various revelations coming to light somehow making it better and worse some days. I finally learned a couple of years ago that I also have PTSD, and sometimes, my chest has hurt to a frightening degree. I’ve called doctors, almost gone to urgent care, panic-texted therapists. But the professionals tell me my heart is fine, other than being badly broken.

Some six years ago I began a series of impassioned adventures, many of which led to what on the surface might appear to be self-destruction; hindsight has shown me they were subconsciously driven in no small part by that broken heart. I’ve only recently began to see the extent of that heartbreak with any true clarity. Sometimes we don’t know how broken we are until we live it out for awhile and see just how much what we’re doing isn’t working anymore.

I was trying, my therapist has told me, to layer my life with so much new experience that I had more to think about than the big, awful shit that had appeared in it.

I learned some mind-altering things while reporting my book Head in the Game years ago.

You probably know that the brain sends zillions of signals to parts of the body, the arms and legs and organs and guts, right? And they send signals back. Everything in the body is always in some sort of conversation with the brain, to put it super simply.

Ever since humans started thinking about things like this, there’s been a debate about whether the seat of human consciousness lies in the brain, or in the heart. (There’s also a whole thing about how the stomach — our guts — also has the same sort of neurons in it that the brain does, but that’s another piece for another day.)

I’d become obsessed with the brain because I felt like there, I could find some answers to some of the things about myself I couldn’t otherwise understand.

But one of the most mind-altering things I learned was this: for all the zillions of signals the brain sends the heart every day, the heart sends twice as many signals back to the brain.

The heart talks to the brain twice as much as the brain talks to the heart.

*

I’ve never made plans to die but I know what thinking about suicide feels like. Scared the shit out of me when those thoughts started happening years ago, and took me a long time to learn how to process those feelings and communicate them to people close to me who needed to know what was going on.

Now, I’ve learned to interpret those suicidal urges as something else: I don’t want my life to literally end, I don’t want my physical body to die, but I want the way that I’m living to be finished — I don’t want to live like this anymore.

These are psychological and spiritual deaths and there are not often clean and easy ways forward from them. Changing your life is complicated shit.

I think a lot about a Jim Carrey quote I first heard while reporting out the Shaun White story in 2017. I was on a mountain at Breckenridge in Colorado talking with his physical therapist Esther Lee, who told me to go watch Jim & Andy, a documentary about Carrey’s time playing comedian Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon, a role for which he won an Oscar. “It like, broke Shaun’s brain,” she told me. “He hasn’t been able to stop thinking about it since we watched it a few days ago.”

In it, Carrey says this:

“At some point, when you create yourself to make it, you're going to have to either let that creation go and take a chance on being [who] you really are, or you're going to have to kill who you really are and fall into your grave, grasping onto a character that you never were.”

To make it, in whatever you’re trying to make of yourself — as an athlete, artist, performer, sure, but also as a friend, a husband, a father, a son.

At some point you have to let go of who you’ve been told you should be all your life, and figure out how to be whoever the hell you actually are.

But that feels like dying sometimes, and really, it’ll probably have to happen over and over again.

*

Things are going the right direction now, internally and externally, and although I still have a ways to go before I feel all right, I’ve made my peace with feeling fucked up at least, and that’s not not a win.

But my marriage was crumbling when I profiled White. I was mid-breakup from my first year-long post-divorce passionate love affair while profiling Slater, then fresh off another such love affair two years after that, while profiling Marks. I was out of shape, I had a thick beard, I didn’t look great, I felt even worse.

And look, I’m about as comparable to an Olympic gold medalist as my dog is to a grizzly bear, but I’ve learned something from these people, something I began to get hints of while working on the White piece and learned more about while doing the Slater piece and which has been driven home to me this past year in wake of meeting Marks and seeing echoes throughout all three of these stories: I’m just now realizing that my real problem all along has simply been an addiction to being an asshole to myself.

Hating yourself is a hell of a drug. There’s something intoxicating about picking yourself apart. But I’ve also realized that whenever that culminates in some sort of rock-bottom moment (or two or three), that dark night of the soul is necessary to teach us something even stronger: the only way out is to stop fighting, and to just live your life, even if that means just letting yourself feel fucking miserable for awhile.

I kind of think you actually have to let yourself just feel fucking miserable for awhile before you can start to find some real joy down underneath it.

That joy is there. You just have to go through the misery first to get to it. Mine the coal to get the diamonds, or some such.

“I was under so much pressure at such a young age for so long,” Marks told me. “It was probably always going to happen.”

*

The tricky thing here is that all that self-loathing can lead to greatness. A lot of times greatness is fueled directly by it. That’s the real fucked-up thing about it. Your self-hate can trick you into thinking you need it. In some ways, at least starting out, you do.

When I was reporting my book Head in the Game years ago, a now-prominent sports psychologist told me there’s a fine line to walk between helping an athlete become a healthier human being and helping them hone their performing prowess. He said something to the effect of, “What makes someone a healthy human being doesn’t necessarily make them a great performer, and sometimes becoming a healthier human being can have a detrimental effect on someone as a performer.”

In other words, he was saying, fixing your shit can fuck up your game.

But I’ve learned that it’s something we all have to grow out of, an adolescence of sorts.

Slater told me something like that during our time together, too. He went through a lot of therapy and other self-work that rendered him calmer and more agreeable and less edgy and as a result, he felt like he was becoming less competitive. Of course, he was also becoming 50-plus years old, which I hear has a way of dulling even the sharpest competitive edges, and rightly so.

But Slater was making a point a friend of his had made years earlier, who recalled giving up the urge to win at all costs, pointing at Slater and how miserable he seemed at his competitive peak, and saying something like, “If he comes in second and is miserable that he didn’t win, and I come in third and I’m thrilled because I had a great time, then who’s really winning?”

*

Whatever pain drives us to greatness, that pain always catches up to us at some point, and that’s when you see people have breakdowns, lose everything, hit rock bottom, hit rock bottom again. It’s life’s worst and most necessary gift.

But time and again, young phenoms get caught up in the blood and sweat and tears and forget about the whole point of all of this, which is the fact that it’s all games out here. Sports are so often compared to battle, to war, but the only real fight is the one taking place in your head and your chest and your guts.

Shaun White won gold in Pyeongchang in 2018 after allowing himself to focus only on the halfpipe, allowing himself to enjoy being fucking great at this one specific thing. “I just decided to be kind to myself,” he told me.

Slater said to me at some point that he felt like life was going right if he was enjoying some 75 percent of it. His girlfriend Kalani — raised in a healthy, happy family — protested, saying no, that’s far too low, that number should be closer to 90 percent. “That was kind of a mind-blowing concept to me,” Slater told me later.

And Marks … what Marks accomplished this week was special, and not just because she won Olympic gold.

*

She got here after getting so burned out and falling into so much pain that her dad urged her to take a break or else she’d fall out of love with surfing for good. She’d become famous as a 13-year-old, as a young and developing woman in the social media age, and she was suffering all of the pressures and new, gross hells that come with that. To cope, for a long time, all she did was train harder, care more, and enjoy herself less. In gorgeous foreign countries, she stayed in her hotel room unless it was time to hit the waves. As her friends began dating and going to clubs and being, well, young women, Marks lived a somewhat monkish life. Well, nun-ish life. She punished her body but along the way was starving her soul.

She lost her way. She lost touch with the ocean. She doubted herself. “I just wasn’t having fun,” she told me. “And then I was feeling guilty about that. That’s where I really struggled, too. I was like, Why do I feel like this when I have this dream life?” She found herself, she said, “In a really dark place.” Her older brother Luke described her as “50 percent of herself.”

After a break, after leaving the surf tour under mysterious circumstances, after going back home to spend half a year with family, surfing where nobody would see her and talking with a therapist and getting honest with herself, in time, she found herself approaching a headspace in which she chased joy and not simply relief from fear or pain.

But getting there wasn’t about bullshitting herself into thinking everything was fine. It was the opposite.

While she was home she talked with a psychologist regularly, confronting the things in her that felt dark and consuming. She looked at the dark shit going on inside of her and saying, more or less, Okay, here’s what’s fucked up, and here’s what can be done about it, and here’s what I can do in spite of it, and how fucking awesome is that? Or at least, that’s my loose interpretation of it all. There’s a strange but real peace that comes with allowing the fucked-up parts of yourself to simply exist.

She took to the waves with her family, her father and her brothers, to just surf. Not train, not perform, not perfect, just surf. “Just how we did it growing up,” she said.

Marks returned to San Clemente, returned to her friends, returned to the tour, and, along the way, she also allowed herself, for the first time, to simply cut loose as a human being.

What her friends and family all told me about during my week with them in San Clemente: How much fun Marks was letting herself have, and how much more they saw her coming alive in the waves again along with that. She drank the best wine Southern California had to offer, she went on safari in South Africa, she ate at the finest restaurants in Europe. She went clubbing in Los Angeles, spending nights dancing her ass off with her friends. And along the way she also won the 2023 World Surf League women’s championship.

When I spent a week in San Clemente earlier this year for the SI story, of course, I saw everything you could reasonably expect to see from one of the best athletes in the world keeping her body and her game at their peak. There were training sessions with custom-tailored exercises just for her, so precious to her that afterward, she asked me to promise not to publish any of the videos I’d taken of them. She did pilates. She installed a new cold plunge tub in the garage of her home overlooking San Clemente. (She was especially jazzed about the little rubber ducky that came with it. “Look at him!” she said, geeking out like a kid watching it bob along the water in the tub. “Lookit that lil’ guy go! He’s cruisin’!”

There were sessions in the sauna in her courtyard, leaving one of her friends recovering by taking a nap on the living room floor. Marks and her coach and agent, Mike Parsons, underwent surf sessions at Hunting Beach Pier in conditions that were far from ideal, with choppy, low breaks. “Training in surf like this is like when a baseball player warms up with a weighted back,” Parsons told me after they had an impromptu competition. He’d returned to the sand to catch his breath; we watched her keep going for another half hour.

But there was also a hell of a lot of fun. There was dinner at Nick’s in downtown San Clemente, where we all got a little wine drunk and ordered Marks Nick’s signature butter cake and had the servers sing her happy birthday even though it wasn’t her birthday. There were skincare sessions with one of her best friends, Cecilee, who’s running her own successful aesthetician business in downtown San Clemente. And maybe one of the best moments of the week was during brunch one morning as we sat at a table outside, when we were approached by a singer who’d been performing inside. The man was wearing a pinstriped three-piece suit and tophat with a manicured white beard, and some serious pipes that he put to proper use singing a bit of jazz and R&B. “A legend,” Marks said later. “Holy shit, he was epic.”

He recognized Marks, told her, “Keep on’ conquerin’ all that ocean, Surfer Girl.”

Then he got to talking with another one of Caroline’s best friends, Alexxa, a surfer and singer. Next thing everyone knew, Alexxa was inside holding a mic and singing, too, something she later told me she never would’ve done a year ago. “It’s cool when one of your friend group gets out of her shell, all of you start to more, too,” she said.

*

The thing about it all is that none of this has anything to do with “fixing” yourself. Something Slater told me after dinner at his house one night in Cocoa Beach has echoed in my chest ever since: “You never really fix it. You just learn to accept it. And then accepting it kind of is fixing it.”

There’s a peace that comes with that, is the point, because on the other side of that acceptance lies the simple truth that all you can do is all you can do. Marks said, “I’m just taking care of me, and honestly doing the best I can, [and so] what other people say doesn’t matter.”

You’re gonna bleed and sometimes the bleeding is necessary but not as often as we might think, and just as necessary are the things like wine and butter cake and dancing. Especially the dancing.

Life will break us all and everything good and everything bad that has ever happened to us folds into whatever’s next, all so many waves rolling into the sand and back out to sea with the tides.

Everything that happens will pass, everything that happens will last forever, and all we can really do is live every moment in full.

It reminds me of that Buddhist proverb about the beautiful glass. You’ve probably heard it: A student asks a master how he can be happy in a world in which everything is temporary, in which the people we love get hurt or sick or killed, in which our hearts are constantly broken.

The master holds up a glass and says that someone he loves who is gone now gave him that glass, and that it is an excellent glass, good at holding water, beautiful in the light of the sun, and it even creates a striking ringing sound when he touches it just so. And one day the wind might blow it over or he might knock it off the table by mistake and the glass will be shattered beyond repair, forever. “I know this glass is already broken,” the master says, “so I enjoy it, incredibly.”