King of the Bumps

Jamie Mitchell grew up in Coss Harbor in Northern New South Wales, Australia. To help young Jamie deal with his asthma, his mom and dad put him in Nippers, a swim program for kids. 26 years later, the 31-year-old Mitchell has never left the water and is simply the best paddleboard athlete on the planet.

“I guess you can say I raced with Jamie Mitchell," laughs long-time professional Ironman Triathlon competitor and now paddleboard racer Paul Huddle. “I didn’t see him for very long once the race started. The guy is the Michael Jordan of the sport. He simply dominates every race he enters.”

The most famous paddleboard event is the 32-mile Molokai-to-Oahu race that occurs every July. Like the Ironman for triathlon, or Wimbledon for tennis, it is the most important event in the sport of paddleboarding. Jamie Mitchell has won the event the past six years in a row.

It’s pretty easy to spot the reason why. You see Mitchell grew up as a fast-twitch athlete, a very good short-distance runner, very fast off the beach in lifeguard competitions and someone who dominated events like the 50-meter freestyle. “You can build endurance,” says Mitchell, “but you have to be born with fast twitch. I was born with fast twitch.”

For a basis of comparison, take a look at triathletes Samantha McGlone and Craig Alexander as well as the runner Ryan Hall. All three started with their raw speed and simply extended their distances. In the past two years Ryan Hall has taken his 1500 meter speed and transferred that to a 2:06:17 marathon. McGlone and Alexander took their fast-twitch assets and made the move to the Ironman in Kona in 2007, and both took second place in their first attempts on the Big
Island.

When an athlete used to speed steps up in distance, at first the longer workouts seem easier – because though it's a longer haul, the intensity is a lot less. Alberto Salazar, who won his first-ever marathon off of a base built on 5,000- and 10,000-meter training, talked about the trap fast-twitch folks can fall into. “When I was focusing on the 10,000, I was the best marathon runner in the world,” he says. “When I started thinking I needed to train as a marathoner and substituted quantity for quality, I lost my speed and my edge.”

Jamie Mitchell has been so successful in Molokai because of the endurance he has built and the fast twitch that he was born with. He loves paddling in the chop, and the bigger the surf the better. He accelerates over and over again during the race to keep catching the bumps – which can be six to eight feet high – putting more and more ocean between himself and the folks looking to upset him. “I love catching the swell and dealing with the challenge of the event,” he admits. “You have the heat, the currents, the wind, the history and the ocean. One year I found out afterwards from the guys in my escort boat that a ten-foot tiger shark had been following me for about ten miles.

"I think there are a number of guys with the physical capabilities to win that race. A couple of times there were a few people close by me for the first few hours. But when they get four hours into the event, a lot of athletes drop their bundle.”

Drop their… bundle?

It’s like Dave Scott or Chris McCormack or Paula Newby-Fraser talking about how Ironman hopefuls crack and crumble. Anyone can look good for a few hours. But how do you deal with adversity and self-doubt? That’s the question Jamie Mitchell has answered over and over again. “When all is said and done, it’s really just you against the ocean,” Mitchell says. “I know what to expect out there and it’s really up to the other guys to try to beat me. You are going to come up against your inner demons, so at the end of the day it comes down to being able to conquer yourself.”

He doesn’t want to lose that edge, so he keeps his long-distance paddleboarding to a minimum. “I train and race for three to four months,” he says. “The races are so demanding, you can only do a certain number every year.” He’ll race Molokai on July 27, an even longer event in France and maybe Catalina in August. That’s it. He is one of the few athletes who have won both Molokai and Catalina in the same year.

We chatted right after he finished up a long day of training. He swims 5,000 meters with a team four times a week and paddles an hour on Tuesday, two hours on Thursday and three to four hours on Saturday. He takes out his stand-up surfboard for about an hour twice a week and, since he is now all of 31, he goes to the gym three times a week to do a core-training workout. He’ll leave for Hawaii to train exclusively for Molokai on June 25 and put in a solid month before defending his title once again. Then it’s off to South Africa in search of some big waves.

Mitchell has found that the training he does for paddleboarding has helped his surfing tremendously. And the surfing helps to keep him excited for those long, solitary hours on the paddleboard. “There are no professional, full-time paddleboarders making a living," he says. “But even if there were, I love the balance of what I do. If I paddled more than three or four months a year I would burn out, and my real passion in life is surfing big waves. At the end of August I put the paddleboard away until March.”

But in late summer, while the paddleboard is still in play and the big waves are on the back burner, Jamie Mitchell is pushing it from Molokai to France to Catalina – where he is definitely the King of the Bumps.