It’s a typical Saturday in Christian Cook’s neighborhood. The public parks and athletic fields that line the road to his house are filled with people playing soccer and baseball. He rides by in his truck, windows down, one hand on the wheel, arm dotted with tattoos and his expression turns to a sly grin. At one point in his life he was a playground junkie, his weekends consisting of pick-up basketball games and the verbal jousting which accompanies such contests.
He grins because at 42-years old those days seem so far from where he is now, both physically and philosophically.
“You go through life with the whole world tugging on your arm, holding you back saying, ‘no, no, no, you can’t do that’. But I say, ‘why not? Of course you can’,” Cook explains. “Every day that I wake up I feel like I’m starting over, like life has just begun. And I feel like in four or five years that I’ll be in better shape than I am now.”
Cooks never been a slouch and at around eight percent body fat, with a defined chest and washboard stomach, he possesses the body of a man half his age. And while his words may sound like an excerpt from a self-help book or the rant of an infomercial pitchman, the difference is the look in Cook’s eyes which tells you wholeheartedly that he believes it.
And if words aren’t convincing enough, seven and a half hours of navigating the open waters of the Pacific should be.
The Molokai Paddleboard race isn’t for weekend warriors or guys who play pick-up basketball. It’s one of the most physically grueling events in sports, covering 32.5 miles from the Hawaiian island of Molokai to Oahu. Cook says, “when it’s just you, a single paddle and a 12-foot paddleboard and you’re 16 miles off shore encountering 20 foot swells and 40 mile per hour winds, a two-hour training session at the gym feels more like rest.”
Of course when you’re working 60-hour weeks managing the Channelside Bennigans, being a husband and raising three young boys, recreation and working out can often be difficult to fit into your schedule. That’s why Cook has embraced a sport which he found combines the two.
THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA
It was out of simple curiosity that Cook first picked up a surfboard at the age of 38. Not knowing anything about the sport, he went to the beach to try and sponge some information off the surfers who were out there. But he says most of them called him a kook, the slang term used to describe somebody who is posing very hard to look like a surfer.
Undaunted, he decided to go to the younger kids who were out on the water, the 13 and 14-year olds. They were much more receptive to Cook’s inquiry and gave him a few quick pointers about how to get up on the board. But it wasn’t easy. He tried and tried again and not being one to quit at anything, ever, eventually he stood up, just barely, and rode his first wave.
“Physically it killed me,” he said. “That first time I lasted maybe thirty minutes in the water and then I came home and slept a couple for hours.”
Four years later Cook’s humble nature and respect for what he calls “Mother Ocean” still leads him to refer to himself as a kook, but a better kook than before he jokes. Surfing and being in the ocean has become is passion in life. So much so that he took his other recreational pastime, weightlifting, and began to curtail his workouts exclusively toward being a better surfer.
But being on the West Coast of Florida, more often than not, Mother Ocean is flat. So to get his fix Cook began to do stand-up paddleboard which requires fewer waves but more core and upper body strength because it involves a long paddle which the rider uses to propel themselves through the water on even the slightest ripple.
Incorporating the paddle became the perfect segue between his workouts in the gym and impromptu trips to Sabastian Inlet near Coco Beach, widely known as the best place to catch decent waves in Florida.
WHERE THE GYM MEETS THE OCEAN
In early 2008, having recently turned 40, Cook felt the need to challenge himself and accomplish a new goal, so he set his sights on the Molokai race. From that day on, there was no looking back. In the year leading up to Molokai, his training took on a dramatic increase in terms of intensity. In fact, for 365 consecutive days, he didn’t miss a single work out, not one, often squeezing in 10 training sessions a week. He even went so far as to make a spreadsheet, tracking his progress and contouring his training to those exercises specific to his needs in the water.
“You have no idea what its like until you’re out there,” Cook said. “The muscles that hurt in mile one through mile eight are totally different from the muscles that begin to hurt in miles nine through 20 and so on.”
He teamed up with surfing buddy Dana Hart and the two split intervals on the open water as an escort boat followed them. The waters were so rough and the winds so intense that Cook says if you missed one stroke or hesitated for a minute, it’s easy to fall back eight feet.
Looking back, he feels that training in the heat and humidity of Florida gave him an edge when it came to dealing with the weather in Hawaii which was much milder. However, despite being in the best shape of his life, he was unprepared and in awe of the physical conditioning of the native islanders.
“Here in Tampa you may stand out like an athlete, but in Hawaii it’s very easy to be humbled by a 70-year-old guy who will run circles around you,” Cook said. “Being so called ‘in-shape’ among the surfing community out there is a completely different story.”
A comment like that carries a lot of weight coming from a guy like Cook because upon first glance fellow gym members look at Cook training and often assume he is a competitive athlete. The style and intensity of his workouts lend the majority of people to guess he is a boxer or perhaps a mixed martial artist. Upon discovering he is a surfer, they are often taken aback.
Cook’s surfing-specific training is geared towards moderate weights done at a moderate pace but for long periods of time. For example, he’ll do a single set of alternating, one-armed back pull downs on the Hammer Strength machine for 20 minutes straight. He says it’s the closet thing to mimicking the actual motion of paddling a board to catch a wave.
And when it comes to cardio vascular conditioning, he does in fact train like a boxer. It’s not unusual for him to do 45 minutes of non-stop speed jump roping, followed by jumping rope on the Bosu Ball for another 15 minutes. That, he says, is done to improve his balance and incorporate the unknown into the routine. Not run of the mill stuff for a middle-aged man
In a sense, Cook is very much like the waves he rides, meaning there are defined mechanisms in place which create the behavior and follow a pattern yet once it begins to take shape anything can happen and therein lies the beauty and genius
of it all.
It’s a mindset that overlaps his daily life. If somebody jumps on a machine he was using at the gym, he says he doesn’t get mad, that just tells him it was time to move on to the next exercise. If the sand at the beach is scalding hot, he says that just means he’s training his feet to be tougher. And if the phone rings at 4 a.m. and a friend says there are good waves on the East Coast, within minutes the boards are on the roof and the two hour drive is spent on the laptop in the passenger seat scheduling shifts and ordering food shipments.
“My ideals and philosophies both in and out of the gym are tailored specifically towards achieving the greatest results,” he said. “Whether it’s your mind or your body, at your core you have to be strong and be able to live with balance and instinct just as you do in the water. Because like the ocean, life is full of unpredictability.”
THE FAMILY GUY
For a man who stands 5-foot-6, Cook’s appearance can be a bit intimidating. Maybe it’s the shaved head, salt and pepper goatee and the tattoos? But spend ten minutes engaged in conversation with him and chances are you’ll feel like you just came from church. He has a way of lifting your spirits to the point where suddenly the world and daily obstacles that seemed so overwhelming don’t seem so hard to overcome. Even on a Facebook it’s common to log in the morning and find a photo of a sunset rising over the horizon of the ocean which he just posted from his camera phone. Typically it’s accompanied by a short reminder to appreciate the day we’ve been given.
It’s one of the reasons his wife Cindy fell in love with him 12 years ago when the two met in a Georgia restaurant which Cook managed. These days she says being the only women in a house with four boys makes he feel like a queen. Their sons Kaleb (11), Noah (8) and Max (7) are just like dad because you’ll rarely find them with a shirt and shoes on, more often just a pair of ‘baggies’ or board shorts and a good suntan. Mom says Noah even insists on wearing his baggies under his school uniform.
Three months before the Molokai race, the couple took a solo trip to the Hawaiian Islands to renew their marriage vows in the sand. Although Cindy prefers to stay out of the water
she is never far from shore with her camera, completely content with her role as the family photographer (all the shots used in this article were taken by her). As you may imagine though, watching from land isn’t always easy because the ocean can be a dangerous place. As Mother Nature dishes it out, Mother Nurture cleans it up, rubbing the heads, kissing the elbows and placing the bandages on both the boys and dad.
“It terrifies me at times,” says Cindy who works at All Children’s Hospital. “Sure I worry about them out there in waves over their head and you can imagine what I see at work. But when it comes to surfing and the water, I just want my kids to live life and experience nature.”
Both parents agree that while it’s not little-league or maybe the norm, the impact surfing and paddleboarding has had on the kids lives has been nothing but positive. Their coordination and physical conditioning is second to none plus, at the same time, they are being taught to respect the earth and be a positive impact on the environment. According to Cook, one of the most rewarding parts of the day is seeing one of his boys pick up a piece of trash left on the beach and put it in the garbage as they walk to the car.
I DON’T WANNA BE “THAT GUY”
When asked about his own childhood, Cook describes his dad as a hard working salesman who smoked a bit, drank a bit and entertained like Dean Martin, and one who was never into exercise.
“My dad was physically spent by the time he was my age,” Cook said. “I’ll never let that happen to me. I mean, I see some guys my age and they act like their life is over. Not me, I embrace resistance. The more somebody tells me it can’t be done, the more excited I get because I know I’m on the right path where I want to be.”
As unstereotypical as the Cook family may be, they really aren’t. Manners, chores and homework are still the tasks of the day. Mom and dad have tattoos but they still gather to eat as a family and talk of taking the dogs to the groomer and getting to bed on time. But yea, instead of dad hanging his feet on the couch, he’s hanging 10 on a wave. And when he uses the word “swell” it’s not in the Ward Cleaver sense.
Lets face it though, surfers often get stereotyped. As do management types. But who says you can’t be both and do it on your own terms while being a good husband and father at the same time? Cook’s philosophy on raising kids is such; kids won’t be what you want them to be or act how you tell them to act just because you say so, ultimately it comes down to who you are, because they look at you and eventually become you.
When the day is over, whether he’s putting away surf boards or timesheets, the memories always resolve back to being in the water and being around his wife and kids.
“I never forget that I’m a dad and that’s a responsibility I take very seriously,” Cook said. “But being in the ocean with the waves gives us something we can all relate to on the same level. When I’m on my board and my kid paddles up to me and says he just caught a wave, we’re not so much father and son as we are just two guys out there talking about something we both enjoy.
I mean I relish the fact that I can hang with my boys as friends but at the same time, whether it’s a kick in the butt they need or a huge hug, I’m a dad first.”