Kiteboarder Sensi Graves is helping women do badass adventure activities [EP 365]

Imagine a world in which women no longer doubted themselves. a world in which you believed anything was possible and that there were no fears or glass ceilings holding you back? Sensi Graves loves helping women do badass things.

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The Outdoor Biz Podcast

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Show Notes

How were you introduced to the Outdoors

I grew up actually 20 minutes down a dirt road in northern California. So in a really rural town in Mendocino County in Northern California. There are 320 people in my town and 50 kids in my high school.

I grew up on 80 acres and my mom was an avid skier. After she graduated high school, she lived in Utah for a number of years. My Mon and my Dad were ski bums out there, and I've always lived an outdoor life. We weren't allowed to watch TV growing up. I have three brothers and we were always playing outside, always playing games, and thankfully we were taken on ski trips and wakeboarding trips and a lot of outdoor time growing up, and so it's been a part of my blood forever.

How'd you get into kiteboarding?

Kind of a roundabout story. Actually, my mom died when I was 16 and after that my dad, was looking for things to fill that void and he, one summer when I was 18 years old, said, we're going to learn to Kiteboard. And I was like, what? I've never even heard of this before. And he was having us watch some videos and I was like, what? What are we doing? I don't even what you're talking about, but he took my three brothers and me out to North Carolina to a place called Rio Water Sports, which at that time and still is the premier kit board school in the US. And we took a week's worth of lessons. I fell in love with it and actually ended up going back there to coach a few years later as a kite board instructor when I was a junior in college.

Tell our listeners about professional kiteboarding competitions and how they work.

To give listeners a picture, you are essentially wakeboarding but driving your own boat. So you have a harness on your waist, you have 20 meters of lines, and then you have a kite, basically like a big piece of fabric, essentially with an inflatable leading edge. that is pulling you across the water and you're using that kite to generate power with the wind, utilizing the wind to pull you across the water, essentially. So it's like the combination of sailing and wakeboarding. You're doing sailing tacks back and forth. You're utilizing the wind just like sails do.

And so there are a variety of disciplines within kiteboarding. You have racing just like sailboat racing. You have big jump disciplines, kind of the thing kiteboarding is known for the most and the awe factor is when people go really high in the sky. But it actually takes a lot of skill to jump really high, and so that's another discipline. Then there's freestyle, which is doing tricks in the air, kind of like behind what you would see behind a wakeboarding boat. Back rolls and front rolls and tantrums and various things. And then the discipline that I competed in was park riding. And so that is much like on the snow. You have rails and boxes and things, we have those same features floating in the water.

You just recently launched a swimmer brand in 2012. What inspired that?

I launched that before I became a pro kiteboarder. I launched that when I was coaching kiteboardi