Tuesday Feb 22, 2022

E6: Maddi Leblanc on Canada’s surfing and SUP racing scene

Did you know there’s a pretty big surfing scene in Canada? Or that stand-up paddle boarding can actually be seriously competitive, like on an international scale? People compete in races that go from short sprints to marathons hundreds of kilometres long.

People have travelled over water with boards and paddles for millennia, but surfing and stand-up paddle boarding — or SUP — originated as sports in parts of Polynesia, particularly Hawaii, in the last hundred or so years. They’ve since become popular around the world, including in Canada, where people like Maddi Leblanc have made careers out of them.

Maddi is a semi-pro SUP athlete, a surf and SUP instructor and the founder of On Board, an annual fundraising event for the Canadian Cancer Society. On this episode, she talks about how SUP helped her recover from a year marked by major loss, her wildest moment on a board, the competitive world of SUP, some of the best spots to surf in Canada and how someone living just about anywhere in Canada can get into surfing or SUP.

This episode covers:

• People are surfing the Great Lakes right now, in February, and apparently that’s normal!

• How stand-up paddle boarding helped Maddi recover from the deaths of two friends in one year

• Maddi’s top surfing spots in Canada

• The Great Lakes are just un-salty seas

• Ocean surfing vs Great Lake surfing

• How get into surfing and SUP, even if you’re landlocked

• Long-distance paddle boarding…like backpacking!

• Maddi’s wildest moment on a board

Music:

Yaki Tori and Mango by Smith The Mister https://smiththemister.bandcamp.com

Smith The Mister https://bit.ly/Smith-The-Mister-YT