SPEED RACER

All Around Athlete Darlene Addison is Addicted to the Rush

By Christina Scannapiego

Darlene Addison runs at lunch. Her fellow ER nurses think she’s completely psycho, but even so, she devours her meal and uses the remainder of her lunch hour to go running. This tidbit tells you a lot about the type of person she is. “The older I get, the more stuff I want to do and I can hardly fit it all in,” she says, clearly feeling an urgency few do at the tender age of thirty-one. Clearly, something drives her; she and her husband just completed a marathon (it was her second, by the way). But the whole running thing is just a side salad—it’s paddle racing that’s her main course, her driving passion.

While a student in Santa Barbara (she studied Marine Biology), Addison trained as a lifeguard, eventually working as a Junior Lifeguard instructor. That’s how she discovered paddling, the perfect activity on days when waves are flat. Intrigued, she decided to check out an actual race one day. “All these people, having a good time competing,” she recalls. “I thought, this is something I can get into!”

She borrowed a board from her supervisor, John Regan, started training with the guys, bought some boards of her own and eventually began competing—and she’s never looked back. Addison started out as a sprint racer, then tackled longer distances, finally working up to one of the biggest annual races: the 32-mile trek from Molokai to Oahu, which she’s done twice now (partnered with Regan and later Keith Mallow). Pretty hardcore, no?

*Read the entire story in the August/September issue of Foam.