The good stewards of the high-performance community

MALIBU, CALIFORNIA — Gabby Reece isn’t trying to fool anyone. All those workouts that she and her husband, big wave surfer Laird Hamilton, host at their lovely home in Malibu? The hours and hours they devote to training and working with everyone from elite athletes to Hollywood stars to the USA men’s national team and everyone in between? The virtually open-door policy they have at their home?

Selfish, she said. Purely selfish.

“The return, selfishly, is so magical,” Reece said in early September, after putting me and Tri Bourne through a pool workout while Hamilton worked with an NBA player. “To see another athlete invigorates both of us because it’s so exciting to put it out there. We’ve been really, really blessed and we’re aware of it and we’re just going to be good stewards.”

She’s joking about the selfish bit, of course, for it is only selfish in the sense that no good deed comes without an intrinsic reward. It calls to mind an episode from Friends — a show in which Reece’s good friend, Courtney Cox, starred as Monica — when Phoebe challenges Joey to find a purely selfless good deed, one that comes with no reward. He finds it impossible. That episode, goofy as it may be, is a fair depiction of the current phase of Hamilton’s and Reece’s careers and lives: The good stewards of the high performance community, where their rewards are not fame or money or anything measurable, but the sweet satisfaction within.

“The things we were able to learn, we have a responsibility to share, because they were shared with us,” Hamilton said. “The only way to true fulfillment is through service. It just happens to be that we get to do it with shiny people. Our thing is a little more glamorous.”

Indeed, it is glamorous what they get to do, Hamilton surfing big waves, revolutionizing what humans are capable of doing on a board, Reece hosting the brightest minds in the health and wellness space on her eponymous podcast, both of them working with high-powered athletes and stars in their pool and sauna in Malibu. It’s a glamor they don’t necessarily care for, more a cool side to the entrée that has been their life as constant doers, pioneers in their own respective spaces, be it big wave surfing or volleyball or media, a field in which both excel.

There is little glamor, for example, when you’ve been dumped off a wave taller than an…