Tony Butt attempts to break free from the claws of a cold water giant.

INTRO: Welcome to Surf Body Soul, a weekly Tracksmag.com blog written by Ryan Huxley specifically for surfers. Ryan is the co-founder and program creator at www.surfbodysoul.com, a website that provides safe, effective, holistic, scientific e-book exercise programs catering for surfers of all age, level and experience.

Tony Butt’s neck surgery and current injury rehabilitation is in my mind relevant for surfers of any background, ability, talent or vintage. Its gift is not limited to Tony’s personal story, which is both compelling and inspiring. It goes further to illuminate the very essence of why we live a surfing life, and how precious it is. For those of you who missed part 1 of Tony’s story I highly recommend reading it at http://www.surfbodysoul.com/blog/index.php/entry/surfers-neck-the-tony-butt-story.html

Below is a brief recap:

‘Tony Butt is a well-respected oceanographer, writer, and Patagonia sponsored big wave surfer. About 6 months ago Tony contacted me at Surfbodysoul regarding advice on a serious neck injury that was hindering his ability to surf the big waves he loved.

Turns out we had both been secretly admiring one another’s articles in ‘The Surfers Path’ magazine. Within a couple of days we connected via skype to assess the severity of his injury and entered the embryonic stages of a rehabilitation strategy. Tony suggested we write an ongoing piece to follow his surgery and rehabilitation towards a complete big wave surf recovery.’

Wave that broke my neck from Tony Butt on Vimeo.

Alive

(words by Tony Butt)

A couple of traumatic events in my teens and early twenties helped to shape my philosophy on life. First was the sudden death of my father. An unhealthy lifestyle of stress, smoking and lack of exercise finished him off at 57. Ironically, he had spent the previous few decades working hard towards his retirement while, at the same time, not having time to keep fit and healthy. Then, I was told I had an incurable, chronic disease. I would probably end up seriously debilitated by the time I reached middle-age, although the long-term symptoms could be slowed if I kept myself fit and healthy. It turned out that it was a mistake and I didn’t have that disease after all, but the original diagnosis had a useful psychological effect on me at the time.

Those events made it blindingly obvious that you should avoid getting stuck into a lifestyle where you are forfeiting your health for material gains. In the end you will reach a point where the comfort brought to you by those material gains fails to compensate for the misery brought to you by your lack of health. In extreme cases, like that of my father, if you sacrifice the present for some hypothetical future gain, you can end up sacrificing the future.

For the last 30 years or so I’ve pretty much stuck to that plan – keeping healthy, living for the moment and avoiding fears about money and status. I’ve been able to think of myself as having a useful resilience to the pressures of the rat-race, a kind of Golden Armour. But living with all that crap around you can cause that Golden Armour to wear thin, and for a few brief moments the thought has crossed my mind whether I ought to get a ‘proper job’ and become a ‘serious adult’.

Recently, however, a bit of thinking reassured me that there was nothing wrong continuing to live the way I was living.

In August this year I underwent an Anterior Cervical Discectomy and Fusion, to fix a herniated disc in my neck. Basically, the surgeon cuts a hole in the front of your neck, reaches in and removes the offending disc. The vertebra above and below the old disc are then allowed to grow together, meaning that you end up with a solid, fused bone. This sounds a bit radical, but it is a surprisingly safe operation with a very large success rate. My surgeon assured me that I could return to surfing big waves within six months.

While I was in the hospital I had a chance to look around me and try to guess what was wrong with some of the other patients in there. At first I felt a bit guilty, because my problem seemed quite trivial compared with some of the other poor buggers in there. After all, I was only having an operation because I wanted to carry on surfing big waves, not because I couldn’t breath or my heart was about to stop pumping.

But then I began to think again. Many of the patients were in that hospital for things such as cancer, heart disease, liver or lung disease – problems directly associated with the stress and poor health associated with a modern materialistic lifestyle. Spinal injuries caused by years of bad posture or heavy lifting, or even by road-traffic accidents can also be attributed to living in the rat-race. In my case, I was in there because I had had an accident doing an activity that not only keeps our bodies working properly; it also fulfils some deep, genetically-programmed need to interact with Nature. It keeps us fit, keeps us happy and, ironically, is precisely what we need if we are to avoid stress and poor-health related illnesses.

I took advantage of the rare opportunity of being surrounded by medical expertise and asked a few questions. I didn’t realize but most males of my age group (early 50s) are at the stage where the shit is just about to hit the fan. Most of them have crafted a nice comfortable lifestyle with plenty of money and possessions, but are looking at imminent serious problems with cholesterol, blood-pressure, blood sugar and other similar things. Luckily I didn’t have to worry about that: my vital statistics were measured by several different people, all of whom me I was ‘as fit as someone half my age’. I told them no, I am the correct fitness for my age, but all the other people in here are as unfit as someone twice their age.

Most people who have spend a few decades doing something that brings them close to Nature or something that perhaps mimics part of our ancient lifestyles as hunter-gatherers, are always bright-eyed, full of energy and simply more ‘alive’ than other people. Shouldn’t we all aspire to being like that, rather than being half dead with a lot of money?

– Ryan

is the co-founder and program creator at www.surfbodysoul.com, a website that provides safe, effective, holistic, scientific e-book exercise programs catering for surfers of all age, level and experience. Ryan is a qualified Physiotherapist, Exercise Physiologist, Advanced Yoga and Pilates instructor. His list of pro surfing clients includes Chippa Wilson, Anthony Walsh, Fergal Smith, Paul Morgan, Liz Clark, Paige Hareb & Rusty Miller.