Have We Reached The Limit of the Possible?

For years, athletes have used the notion of impossible as motivation. If it can't be done, that was all the more reason to try. And really, after skate legend Tony Hawk pulled off a 900 at the 1999 X-Games, for a few years running, doing the impossible became par for the action sport's course.

To this same end, Garrett MacNamara is one of a handful of the world's very best big wave riders. In 2006, he won the Billibong XXL (the Superbowl of big wave surfing) for paddling into what has been called "a Godzilla-like wave" at Maverick's, off the coast of Northern California. Longtime paddle veteran Peter Mel called it "the biggest wave ever paddled into" and not many have since disagreed. Last year, G-Mac, as he is called, and his tow-in surfing partner Keallii Mamala, took a trip to Alaska to become the first-and many argue the very last-to ride glacier-generated tsunami waves up to about 25 feet. Afterwards, when reporters asked if glacier surfing was a new surfing spin-off, MacNamara responded "I wouldn't recommend it for anyone. I won't be going back. This is not a new sport."

I was speaking to MacNamara earlier this week and we were talking about the level the sport has reached and he made a curious statement: "When it comes to what the men are doing in big wave surfing, there isn't that much more to be done. We've pretty much hit the ceiling."

"He's not wrong," said EXPN.com editor Micah Abrams, when I relayed G-Mac's comments. "On the men's side of this sport (the women still have a ways to go for claims like this)," he continued, "it's no longer about reaching new heights, it's just about finding new waves."

Which is just about the truth. Unless someone discovers a 200 foot wave breaking in some secret spot somewhere about the globe, the sport of big wave surfing has reached something of an apex.

Now this in itself may seem peculiar. After all, big wave and tow in surfing didn't really become part of the mainstream consciousness until the late 1990s. So in just about ten years we've already reached the sport's limit. But this isn't the only sport where things are trending in this direction.

Earlier this morning, I got an email from longtime Canadian ski industry veteran Steven Threndyle who was describing a recent mountain bike contest in Whistler where a Spanish contestant pulled off a double back-flip that absolutely demolished the entire competition. Meaning no one there could come close to that trick and no one even wanted to try.

I'm not saying a double back flip is the ultimate in mountain biking tricks, but I am saying that we are starting to head towards a direction where adrenaline sports and the basic laws of physics are working against one another. This is an entirely strange idea in the land of things extreme-that there might, in fact, be a glass ceiling and that some of our competitors are actually starting to reach it.

Why this is interesting here is that the notion of ‘impossible' has long been an anathema to athletes. In fact, Adidas ran an ad campaign not too long ago with the tag line "impossible is nothing." But, as it turns out, the athletes themselves are starting to disagree.

It used to be that the impossible we're talking about was akin to Bannister breaking the four minute mile or Yeager flying through the sound barrier-more mental blocks built on superstition than actual physical limits.

But this newer version seems to be more in line with changing the rate of falling objects from thirty-two feet per second per second-which is the fundamental law of gravity atop the planet earth.

What this seems to mean is that the impossible we're now scratching at often comes with death as the consequence of success-meaning we've hit a real limit. What strikes me as interesting is how this is going to affect athletic motivation. For the first time in sporting history, we may have arrived at a place where "no" actually means "no" and how the athletes react and what happens next will be anyone's guess.