Kyle Korver's Big Night, and the Day on the Ocean That Made It Possible – The Triangle Blog – Grantland

ACT 2: YESTERDAY, HE SPEAKS OF THE MISOGI
Two days later Kyle is on the phone, on an off day, sounding relaxed. He has a theory about how he did it. It sounds a bit far-fetched, maybe, but do you have a few minutes?
Hear him out. It’s important.
Most of the guys on the team haven’t heard it.
Most of them, he thinks, probably wouldn’t get it. Here he is:
“There’s a jiu-jitsu concept that was introduced to me this summer called the misogi. It comes from the idea that as we get older we take fewer risks, think more inside the box, get more careful, make more decisions based on fear. To combat this, once a year you do something that you’re not sure you can do. That’s the misogi. I’m not talking a marathon — lots of people do that. It’s more like, climb to the top of the farthest mountain you can see. That’s where I’m gonna go.
“So as my trainer is telling me all this, I’m like, ‘Yes, I get this.’ I feel it. I feel it in my basketball game. I want to work on different moves, catch and shoot faster. But what are we doing?
“He says, ‘Have you ever stand-up paddleboarded before?’ No. But I’m in. ‘How do you feel about paddleboarding from the Channel Islands to Santa Barbara? Twenty-five miles across open water?’ I’m in!
“So we practice seven or eight times. Then we took a boat to the islands in early September. Suddenly I found myself in the middle of the ocean, on a 13-foot board called the Big Easy. I was with two friends. We had packs. A boat followed us: Every few hours they’d throw us Gatorade, water, a Clif Bar. The first few hours, I kept falling. I had to paddle from my knees. Maybe six hours in, getting baked, this pod of dolphins comes flying in from nowhere. They’re under us, around us. It was magical. Out of a movie! I was like, ‘Yo! Come with us! We’re gonna make it!’ I started paddling really fast. Then, an hour later, this dorsal fin pokes out of the water near us. And it keeps going up and up and up. This thing was like two and a half feet tall, and it comes for us. It comes for us! I was like, ‘Is that a killer whale? It’s so big!’ But there are no killer whales in Santa Barbara.
“The guy in the boat jumped up and said, ‘That’s a mola mola.’
“I said, ‘Does it have teeth? We’re so scared.’
“We’re standing our boards with our paddles in our hands. Turned out it was a 2,000-pound fish.
“I could talk about this for a long time.
“The point is, as we’re paddleboarding … there wasn’t a tree, there wasn’t a corner, there weren’t mile markers. You had to break it down even smaller. Into the stroke. So I sat there and tried to perfect my stroke each time I pull. The angles of how I’m pulling the paddle back and going forward. How long I’m going. How I’m using my wrist. All these things. You try to make the stroke perfect. It took nine hours.
“My bones felt hungover for like two weeks. Training camp started and I thought I was in bad shape. But I recovered, and I think I’ve become more serious about my shot. My mechanics. My revolutions. The stroke.
“That’s what the misogi did.”
via Kyle Korver’s Big Night, and the Day on the Ocean That Made It Possible – The Triangle Blog – Grantland.