Layne Beachley begins each day with a visit to her happy place. Ideally she spends no less than an hour surfing her local break at Freshwater on Sydney’s northern beaches after the “briefcase bandits and schoolkids” have been and gone. Today she tweaks her morning routine to make time to meet in the Royal Botanic Garden on the other side of Sydney Harbour.
With 12 surfboards in the garage and almost five decades of the daily ritual in her arms and legs, the seven-time world surfing champion is prepared for any and all conditions in the water. When the waves are not quite to her liking, or on a rare occasion when she accepts she has too much else to do, Beachley still finds time to slip into the ocean.
“I prioritise surfing over most things,” Beachley says. “It’s my happy place. It’s where I decompress. It’s where I fill my own cup. And it helps me feel inspired and motivated, which then helps me inspire and motivate others.
Beachley has had to learn to slow down – in and out of the water. Photograph: Blake Sharp-Wiggins/The Guardian
“But I have an all-or-something approach to it. If I don’t have time to surf then I’ll take five minutes to run and jump in the water, immerse myself, ground myself and cleanse my mind.”
The gardens around the The Calyx have started to bloom. That means more visitors to the inner-city green space, so Beachley picks out an empty path. She sets off like a woman on a mission, or probably just someone pressed for time, as we power downhill toward the water.
Beachley pauses close to a dozen times to pick up pieces of plastic and other litter along the way. “I’m always scouring the ground for it,” she says. “I have no problems with getting my hands dirty. If anything like plastic or paper or a can – any litter – is within 20km of the ocean, it’s going to end up in there.” A beetle slowly making its way across the walking track is rescued and placed in a tree.
The chair of Surfing Australia insists we are meeting away from the best breaks in the city to enjoy the calm and quiet space, rather than to avoid any local celebrity spotters around Manly or Freshwater. “They’re just so used to seeing me, no one really cares,” Beachley says. “Sometimes if I paddle out to a new spot, I might get, ‘Oh, what are you doing out here?’ The answer is always the same, ‘Surfing, like you.’”
Beachley has had to learn to slow down – in and out of the water. She won seven world titles – including a record-breaking six in a row between 1998 and 2003 – with a relentless determination to be “the best of the best”. She now recognises that she paid a price, as much as her opponents, for her win-at-all-costs mentality.
“My peers tagged me as having the compassion of a tiger shark,” she says. “I was very fierce. I was very focused. I was very driven. I had expectations of myself, which I then projected on to other people. It was all just really toxic and I was hard work to be around.”
‘I literally only remember the world titles that I won based on the way I celebrated them.’ Photograph: Blake Sharp-Wiggins/The Guardian
When considering which of her many sporting and personal successes, which include being appointed as an officer of the Order of Australia in 2015, now feels like her crowning achievement, Beachley splits her seven world titles into two buckets. The first and last are what she calls “love-based world titles”, when she was able to focus on the process. In between are five “fear-based world titles”, when any joy was sucked out by being “outcome-driven”.
“I literally only remember the world titles that I won based on the way I celebrated them,” Beachley says. “So I don’t remember winning my second one. I didn’t even celebrate it. It was just a matter of … next.”
Beachley started surfing at the age of four. Along with her family, she became known in the Manly surfing scene. By 15 she was competing and winning against men as she developed a strength and style that would take her across the globe. But even as she set the highest of standards and broke records for world titles and riding the biggest waves, Beachley was still searching for a sense of satisfaction.
“I got to my sixth title, my sixth consecutive one, and I realised that what I was going for was not the shiny thing,” she says. “It was not the trophies, it was not the world titles. It was self-worth, it was love. And that came from an old story, back when I was eight years old, and Dad said, ‘You’re adopted.’”
Beachley competes in 2006 in Maui, Hawaii. Photograph: Kirstin Scholtz/World Surf League/Getty Images
Beachley’s mother, Valerie, suffered a post-operative brain haemorrhage and died when Layne was six. Two years later her father, Neil, revealed that she had been adopted when she was six weeks old. Her birth mother had been 17. Beachley would eventually seek out and meet her birth mother, who claims to have been date raped by her biological father, in California in 1999.
“I crafted a story around, ‘What’s going to make me worthy of love? OK, I’m going to have to become the best in the world.’
“I became the best in the world after my first world title. But I’m like, ‘I’m not worthy of love yet. What about if I become the best of the best?’ So that’s when I went after six.
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“When I got to the sixth, I’m like, ‘OK, I’m enough now. But let’s go for seven.’ And that’s when my body broke down.”
Beachley not only bears mental scars from decades of competitive surfing. She has physical reminders of the years she spent pushing her body to breaking point – and sometimes beyond. A spine injury sustained in a frightening fall while surfing in Hawaii remains the most dramatic. But the problems now start at her hips and lower back and spread further out.
“All of my aches and pains are a result of self-abuse,” she says. I’ve flogged my body and I never really, until I got older and wiser, so to speak, allowed myself to heal.
“I’m now in my 50s and in constant pain management. That comes through a variety of different modalities, such as meditation, breath work, yoga, massage, chiropractor, physio and acupuncture. It’s a lot.”
‘Why do we wait for the wake-up call before we actually start taking good care of ourselves?’ Photograph: Blake Sharp-Wiggins/The Guardian
It took Beachley several years after her retirement from competitive surfing in 2008, and a not-so gentle nudge from her husband, Kirk Pengelly, to properly give attention to her mental health and wellbeing. A first of her two significant “wake-up calls” had come during her surfing career, when she “severed 80% of my spinal cord, continued competing and didn’t really treat it at all”.
The second came when Pengelly – a guitarist, saxophonist and founding member of INXS – stopped Beachley in her tracks when he asked, “Why do I always get the broken Layne?”
“I reserved the most broken, depleted version of myself to my husband and my loved ones,” she says. “I didn’t make the time for fun with him, I had all the fun with everybody else.”
Beachley is now a motivational speaker who draws on her experience of overcoming challenges and setbacks to try to empower lives through connection, confidence and self-care. She co-founded Awake Academy with Tess Brouwer, a positive psychology practitioner and wellness coach, in 2020 and this month will release a podcast called The Wake-Up Call. “We’re literally asking the question, ‘Why do we wait for the wake-up call before we actually start taking good care of ourselves?’”
Beachley says she loves seeing more women and girls surfing. Photograph: Blake Sharp-Wiggins/The Guardian
The 53-year-old might still spend as much time as possible in the waters that she grew up in and around but much has changed since she was one of barely any girls learning to surf. Australia has had four other women claim world surfing titles since Beachley’s last in 2006, including Stephanie Gilmore, who went on to break Beachley’s record with an eighth crown. Last month Molly Picklum, 22, joined the honour roll, with Beachley predicting more success to come.
“I first met Molly when she was 15,” she says. “She won the Layne Beachley award at my talent identification camp. To see someone like that fulfil their potential and, of course, truly know what it takes, I have the utmost admiration and respect.
“But this morning, the girls outnumbered the boys. That’s a massive shift. That’s a celebration. I love seeing the girls in the water. I have a little fist bump when I paddle out and see that.”
