Or beer. Danny tells me how he really only got into standup in or so when someone brought a board to outrigger practice, and that the Battle of the Paddle was his first legitimate SUP race. He took it up simply because it was a natural extension of outrigger.
Try doing a Google search for Danny Ching. But remarkably absent is any profile of Danny Ching, the champion standup paddler. Proving people wrong started early for Danny. He can paddle any craft that requires a blade, and when his uncle, Josh Crayton, 43, introduced him to flatwater kayaking at 16, he took to it naturally.
Crayton had Olympic kayaking aspirations, which naturally rubbed off on Ching. After two years of training, Ching made a serious push to make the U. National Team in At the awards ceremony, it was announced that he was on the team. He was off the squad. Ching never reviewed the tape himself. The perceived snub left him deflated. He threw himself back into outrigger. He made another run in in two-man sprint, making the team for the Pan Am Games, but the lifestyle was grueling.
That was the end of his Olympic experience. It lit a fire in him to train harder and refocus on a game he was best at. Two years later he took the one-man outrigger world title. She passed on a Sunday morning. The next Friday, we paddled out to sea and so many people came down to paddle out with us.
We took her ashes a quarter-mile out to sea. There were people there from all over the country. Her death left an enormous void in the family. Danny had just finished college at Cal State University, Dominguez Hills and as he puts it, was lacking direction. Fortunately I landed in a good situation when I met my business partner, Greg Jensen. Ching took a leap of faith, and later that year, the duo formed SUP. It was brutal, with long nights and longer days as they worked to design boards and set up distribution.
It is evident at the sight of Danny and Leah together that the love between the two runs deep. An avid outrigger paddler herself, Leah met Danny in when she decided she wanted to take her paddling skills to the next level.
She joined the Lanakila Club and, because of how it worked with her hectic work schedule, began training with the all-male team that Danny coached. It grew overtime because of their shared love for paddling. When I finally caught up to the training group, Danny and Leah checked to make sure I was holding up okay.
At the sight of my struggle, Danny suggested that I hang back to watch the rest of training, and with Leah in her outrigger, escorted me to a shallow spot near the marina seawall. A family friend and long-time member of Lanakila Club, Tim, took a break from his leisure paddle to keep me company. We watched the athletes do timed sprints for the next hour or so while sharing stories about life, paddling adventures, and the supportive paddling community the Chings helped establish.
I observed during the training that she paddles as strongly as he does, her outrigger quickly skimming across the water alongside his as she hollers back words of encouragement to him. And she does all this with a missing right bicep which she lost during a boating accident!
It is quite symbolic of their relationship, if you ask me. While the energy on water that day was high on adrenaline, back on land, it was quite the opposite. Each athlete ascended from the dock with a certain peacefulness and equanimity as if they were Tibetan monks just coming out of a meditation. Perhaps they were doing a mental review of what they learned at training, or how they can improve in time for the race in North Carolina.
Maybe it was their way of refueling the energy they exhausted out on the water. Sign in. Log into your account. View site navigation. VIRUS is fusing technology and color together in the future is bright collection. Explore New Collection. Cart 0. Added to Cart. Enter your email.
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