Shane Dorian left his pound of flesh on the reef. Photos: Instagram//Screenshot
Shane Dorian has surfed some of the biggest waves on the planet. He’s no stranger to the dangers that come with riding waves, and he’s had plenty of surf-related injuries. Recently, however, he had a good one that required a few staples to stitch his head back together.
“I have four staples in the back of my head,” he explained in an Instagram post. “I ran into the reef. I was surfing a heavy wave here in Indonesia. I went over the falls and hit the reef incredibly hard on my head. I also trashed my shoulder with a bunch of scrapes — really deep kind of hamburger cuts on my shoulder, so long story short, I’m out of the water for the next seven days.”
Luckily, it wasn’t worse. Seven days, in the grand scheme of things, is not a big deal. But his injury did make him think about a few things: namely his fitness, which has been one of his main focuses for a while now.
“It got me reflecting to last year when I was here in Indonesia,” he says in the video. “I surfed pretty much every day and I was surfing pretty good, but I was surfing once a day. This year has been really different… I’ve been here for over a month, and for most of that month the waves have been a mixed bag, but really fun. Most of the days I surfed twice a day… there’s no chance I could have done that last year, and the big difference for me was training.”