Norwegian racer Miriam Rasmussen was a late starter to windsurfing, but that hasn’t held her back. From competing around the world to setting national speed records, Miriam has forged her own path in the sport from a challenging beginning. Learn more about Miriam’s inspiring path as she tells us in her own words, “The story so far, …or how I stopped worrying and learned to love windsurfing!”
Words Miriam Rasmussen & Paul Fostervold // Photos Paul Fostervold
One of the few regrets I have in life is that I didn’t discover windsurfing until I was 30 years old. I just turned 39 the other week, and when I reflect on how exciting my life has been for the past 6-7 years I can only start wondering, “What if…?” Well, I usually kill this notion as quickly as it appears, and rather choose to focus on the present and the future, but every now and then I take a trip down memory lane. Here’s a brief walk-through of the background which has led me into the world of windsurfing, and left me stuck there!
DYSLEXIA
My life was rather nice for my first years, apart from the fact that I grew up being constantly but lovingly harassed and tormented by my two elder brothers, I was fine! I remember looking forward immensely to starting in school. The anticipation quickly turned into despair, and a 12 year ordeal followed. It turned out that I was properly dyslexic. Of course nobody knew at the time, so subsequently I was labelled stupid instead. I remember I couldn’t for the life of me understand why; inside of me I felt pretty smart, I just struggled a bit getting it out for everyone to see! Throw in a dose of ADD on top of this, and it was a recipe for disaster! So school became quite a crappy experience. I made the most out of my childhood by being physically active; horse riding stuck as my #1 activity, I got my own horse and created my own safe haven at the stables.
RETOX
At 19 this was taken away from me. I stopped at a red light, the car that was behind me didn’t. She rammed into me at high speed, and rendered me useless on all accounts. With no prospects of academic merit, nor the joy of being physically active, I handled it the best I could, prescribing proper amounts of liquid anaesthetics (alcohol) into my system on a regular basis! I won’t pretend I didn’t have fun these years, so I’m not whining here, I’m just pointing out that this happened, and delayed the rest of my life for 10 years. There was however something lurking in the shadows, like an unfulfilled yearning I couldn’t quite define. So I tried being a mother and housewife, and told myself that this was it! It turned out that it wasn’t, although the children part was quite nice.
A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS
To my dismay, my dear brother’s death was needed to wake me up from the living dead. I stumbled into years of depression, eating disorders and anxiety, and reflected a great deal on what I was doing with my life. It still felt like something was missing, but I just couldn’t define what it was. At this point my neck started to recuperate and I felt I could handle greater workloads. So I endeavoured to explore a variety of sports and activities, like climbing, skiing, snowboarding, surfing and windsurfing. My husband at the time didn’t see eye to eye with me on this. To be specific, he made it crystal clear that he didn’t appreciate me taking up any of these activities, and if I persisted to do so, I could find the door and leave. Which I did with no further ado. A shame really, life with him wasn’t half bad, but I think the feeling that I’d been living my life so far at someone else’s beck and call made me stand up for myself this time. So with no steady job, no boyfriend, two children and no plan I ventured into the world, head high – what could possibly go wrong? It didn’t take long for me to find out – the next summer, my second year of windsurfing, I did a high energy catapult into a sandbank, thrusting my extended leg into the bottom and shattering my knee into 37 fragments. I spent 2 weeks in the hospital before they tried to operate on it; the prognosis was uncertain, I spent 6 months on crutches before I could walk, lost a lot of weight, and did in general not feel great. It felt like free-falling without a safety net. At this time my future certainly did not look bright.
STARTING OVER
In a way my new life starts here. At the very bottom, both physically and mentally, everything could only get better from this point on, and so it did. With my new altruistic boyfriend guarding my back and slowly building myself up from scratch, I delved into my new life of activities and challenges for years. At around this point we discussed whether we should document my progress, and we decided to do this through a social media blog. He bought a camera and off we went.
THE INFAMOUS PICTURE
In his pursuit of making ‘never before’ seen pictures of windsurfing, my photographer came up with the idea to ‘photoshop’ in a wavy background in place of a rather dull original seascape on a shot of me blasting in a bikini. Sure enough, after being published in various windsurfing related web portals, the reactions went through the roof. Partly because the picture itself is great, but also because of the ‘photoshop’ work. This set off a heated discussion whether this was the proper way to go about things or not online, and I was deemed by some to have a short and eventless future in the windsurfing industry. Long story short, in less than 6 weeks after the picture was published I started getting sponsorship offers, and within the next 12 months I was practically fully sponsored in terms of gear. A bit premature you could argue, after all, I wasn’t close to fully planing gybes and hadn’t even considered participating in any form of competition at this point. What blows my mind is that this picture was published in late October 2013. That’s 5 years ago, and I was still literally a beginner! The following years have been so intense it’s like time itself has stopped, looking back it feels more like this was 10 years ago in time!
THE HEAT IS ON
All of a sudden lots of people were following my profile on social media. As we carefully selected which pictures to publish, and my stance was naturally good, I came across as far more skilled than I really was at the time. This felt a bit awkward, so I was in a hurry to improve my skills to say the least! I started using my updates to instigate discussions about gear, trim and technique, which was very helpful and definitely sped up my learning process. I entered a couple of PWA events, mainly to define learning goals. Part fantastic, part horrible experiences, but I have tried to make room for one or more world cup events every year since then. I feel more motivated now than ever, and will definitely participate in at least one in 2019. It also turns out that somehow I have a certain talent for speed sailing. Due to my ADD disorder, I don’t seem to lose my cool, no matter how fast I go, which makes me stick with my stance no matter what. Unfortunately I couldn’t sail more than one speed event in 2018, due to injuries earlier that year, but 2019 looks good; physically and mentally I’m prepared for what’s to come, and I’m super motivated to improve a lot from my current 43 knot / 500 metre average speed set in Lüderitz last year.
WORK IN PROGRESS
From here on, we’ve been working in a fairly structured manner, both in terms of the development of my skills, but also in terms of commitment to social media. Our strategy in social media was plain and simple. Using the motto, “A good presentation of a poor achievement is better than a poor presentation of a good achievement”, we set off to promote me and the sport from a lifestyle point of view; simply depicting my everyday joy of learning how to windsurf. Traditionally the perception of who’s getting sponsorships and who’s not, has been connected to skill levels and racing results only. From where we were standing, we had a strong belief that we could reach the beginner/intermediate market in a good way with a down to earth, blissful joy style in our presentation. Bringing new customers into the sport is in our opinion better than fighting over the same, aging customer groups. The best part of this equation was that there wasn’t really anyone out there that claimed this spot, all we could see was fierce, aggressive introvert guys doing extreme stuff, hardly someone beginners or girls were likely to identify themselves with. So I entered the stage, all smiles and silliness. We found a nice formula with a mix of humour, variation, and performance, depicting the beauty of the sport and promoting my sponsors. This still seems to work, as we’re able to create a great deal of response from my followers, which is a simple measure on the relevance of what we’re doing. As the battle of sponsorship crumbs from the industry’s table unfolded, it became clear to me that I wasn’t welcomed by everyone. Apparently a number of riders felt they deserved my sponsorships as they were better riders than I was, so I got my share of resentment from the community on account of this. For the past years most of these voices have however been silenced. I think partly this is due to the fact that I’ve proven myself as a rider, and partly because more people have started to appreciate the value of the work we do on social media. Anyone that has ever have tried to manage a social media account will surely acknowledge the ridiculous amount of work that goes in to this in order to succeed, as for the rest of you, trust me, it’s hard work!
WHY DOES IT STICK
I’m aware that my choice to break out from a settled ‘normal’ life to become a full time windsurfer is a little out of the ordinary. To better understand my priorities, please consider my background, so many others have the opportunity to fulfil themselves through education and work careers. On this account my hands are tied due to my dyslexia. To top this off, I was cut off from living a life with any kind of excitement due to my neck injury. So when windsurfing came along, it ticked all boxes. By gradually building my physique and skill levels I’ve experienced a very strong feeling of accomplishment over the years. Add the sheer thrill of speed to this and there’s your explanation why I can’t live without windsurfing in my life. Because windsurfing makes me who I am, windsurfing makes me be someone. The feeling of happiness and fulfilment I get on the water is such a strong contrast to what I grew up feeling, that it makes everything right again. And believe me, I prefer to feel the way that windsurfing makes me feel any day of the week! So for me there is no plan B, there are no alternatives. Windsurfing saves my life every day of the year by giving me something to look back on and something to look forward to. I honestly don’t know where I would be without it!
THE FUTURE
I would really love to be able to live off windsurfing in the future. My plans to create an adequate income are as follows:
– Start hosting clinics for beginners and intermediates. Through my social media platforms I can reach quite a number of people who would be interested in clinics. I just ran my two first clinics in Egypt, and have many more scheduled throughout the year.
– Create a keynote presentation and sell it to the corporate market. This is actually already done and by the time you read this I’ll have held it three times.
– Establish a ‘webshop’, and try to generate a moderate income from selling windsurfing gear. Also done already and at least it’s set up, and first batch of gear is ordered.
– Nurture and improve my existing sponsorship contracts.
– Rent out our cabin in the mountains.
I have very moderate expectations to the levels of income I realistically can hope to generate from this, but as the amount of money I have doesn’t seem to correlate to the degree of happiness I feel, I only need enough to keep me floating. No matter how this turns out in the end, I can at least look back and say to myself, I gave it my best shot! Only the future knows what’s in store for me, but we will try and make this dream happen!