I'm an instructor in Kettlebells and currently a student in Pilates from South Africa. Looking to move from Pretoria to Cape Town as soon as I'm done with my Pilates course...
I'm also a big wave surfer and I got into training when I realized that the waves I want to surf don't happen often enough for surfing to be sufficient training for these waves. I've always actually been interested in exercise and training, and I did Karate from 8 years old, but I stopped when I was 15 due to surfing taking up all my time. I also used to skateboard during that same period of time, before I moved to the ocean at 14 and started surfing. I started self-training at 16 years old when I realized that the ocean does not push me any more, except on big days, which don't happen often enough to give me the level of exercise I need to actually ride the biggest days. So I started doing the bodyweight exercises I learned through my Karate training as well as a couple of years of elementary school rugby. A real breakthrough happened when I made myself a pull up bar, and I started really getting stronger. At 19 years old, right after graduating High School, I moved up to Pretoria for a few months, living with my parents (I grew up with my grandparents) and I did a Kettlebell course under my father, who has been doing Kettlebells for the past 9 years, being one of the first people in South Africa to train with them. I remember swinging them around and doing some exercises with them when I was 12 years old, and lived with them for a year and a half. This was one of the most important periods of my life, where I really started to learn about the value of exercise. So, when I came back up to them for a few months to do his course, I instantly fell in love with Kettlebells. They provided a great way for me to train much harder than bodyweight allowed, in a way that simulated functional movement patterns that could translate directly into surfing performance. I quickly grew stronger, and when I went back to the ocean for the surfing season (autumn and winter) I quickly realized how much the kettlebells benefited me, and I reached levels of performance previously inconceivable to me, riding waves of up to 7m high without experiencing much difficulty. At the end of the winter, in mid-spring, I came back to pretoria, to start a course in Pilates. I have decided to make training other people my livelyhood, because it will not only help me grow stronger myself, but also allow me the time to practice surfing, as people would be training before and after work, giving me the majority of the day to surf and train. (Sadly this will cut into my sleeping time, as I'd have to wake up early for my first clients, and work into the evening for my later clients, but a simple biphasic sleep schedule (6 hours at night and 4 hours in the day) would fix this and still allow me ample daylight hours for surfing and training.)
I have one major goal with all of this: Get into the top 10 in Big Wave Surfing. (The fact that I hit the mark for big wave surfing (over 6m) already puts me into the top 100, as there are only 100 people in the world capable of riding waves in excess of 6m.)
Although I'm in the top 100, only the top 30 are invited to contests in the newly established Big Wave World Tour (only in existence for the past 4 years, before that Big Wave Surfing was a lifestyle with one or two contests here and there, not a sport that can be pursued as a profession.) and only the top 10 are consistently invited to all of the contests. So, the reality is, to pursue my passion as a profession, I have to reach not the top 1 percentile, which I'm already in, but I have to reach the top 0.001 percentile. Too bad I'm not in 'normal' surfing, where acrobatics and tricks on small-medium waves are the judging criteria, and where the money lies. But I foresee that BWS will soon become a much more prolific sport, with webcasts becoming the most popular method for gaining an audience for the sport. It definitely has much more potential for becoming a mainstream spectator sport than standard surfing, which is mostly viewed by surfers only.