Who is Garrett McNamara?
Born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1967, Garrett McNamara moved to Hawaii’s North Shore at age eleven, where he spent his formative years surfing the legendary breaks of Sunset and Waimea. By seventeen, he was competing in the Triple Crown of Surfing, the sport’s most prestigious winter competition.
By his thirties, McNamara had become one of the world’s most fearless tow-in surfers – the extreme discipline where jet skis tow athletes into massive swells. In 2010, he traveled to Nazaré, Portugal, a remote stretch of coast famous for generating extraordinary wave formations. On November 1st, 2011, he rode a 78-foot wave at Praia do Norte, certified by Guinness as the largest wave ever surfed.
In January 2013, McNamara caught an estimated 100-foot wave at the same break. He has earned eight Guinness World Records total. He became the subject of HBO’s Emmy-winning documentary series “100 Foot Wave,” which premiered in 2021 and has run for three seasons. In 2013, the Portuguese Navy awarded him the Vasco da Gama Medal of Honor – a distinction previously given only to Portuguese nationals and one foreigner in history.
The Challenge
Big wave surfing at this scale is among the most physically punishing endeavors in sport. Wipeouts subject the human body to forces equivalent to high-speed car accidents – repeated across decades of competition. Over his career, McNamara sustained broken bones in his feet, ribs, and back. In January 2016, a catastrophic wipeout at Mavericks in California shattered his shoulder into multiple pieces and broke his upper arm, requiring surgical reconstruction.
McNamara has suffered an estimated one hundred concussions over his career. By the time he connected with Wellbeing International Foundation, he was carrying the cumulative toll of forty-plus years of athletic trauma: chronic pain in his neck, back, and shoulders, along with persistent skin issues that had plagued him for years. Six years before seeking CFT, he had resigned himself to surfing only small waves – the ocean that defined his life now seemed inaccessible to him.
The Turning Point
McNamara has always approached recovery with the same intensity he brings to the ocean. After the 2016 Mavericks injury, he assembled a multidisciplinary team – osteopaths, Pilates instructors, yoga practitioners, and traditional Hawaiian lomi lomi therapists – to rebuild what the wipeout had broken. This intensive rehabilitation brought him from approximately forty percent functionality back to eighty percent, enough to return to waves. But the chronic pain in his neck, back, and shoulders persisted – a decade-long companion that limited his confidence and willingness to pursue the biggest swells.
The introduction to Wellbeing International Foundation and Cell-Free Therapy offered a different approach: an autologous biological preparation derived entirely from his own blood. A small sample was drawn, a specific pro-regenerative cell fraction was isolated and conditioned in a GMP-certified laboratory, and the resulting preparation was delivered back to McNamara for administration.
The Outcome
McNamara has described striking changes in both breadth and speed. Across his treatment sessions, he reported progressive resolution of chronic pain in his neck, back, and shoulders. He also described clearer skin and renewed confidence. For an athlete who had spent six years limiting himself to small-wave days, knowing his body couldn’t handle the forces of the swells that defined his career, the shift was transformative. He returned to surfing big waves.
Back to the Big Days
What makes his story compelling is its context. This is not an athlete in his twenties bouncing back from a single injury. This is a 58-year-old man with more than four decades of accumulated physical trauma who had resigned himself to scaling back the very thing that defines him. Yet his experience changed his relationship with the ocean and with the rest of his life.
McNamara continues to live between Nazaré and Hawaii with his wife Nicole, mentoring the next generation of big wave surfers – and once again joining them on the biggest days.