Meet Your 2015 Men's Health Man

The MH team looked at one another in disbelief.

Some shook their heads. “He can’t be serious,” seemed to be the collective sentiment rolling around the office. The source of our slack-jawed amazement? Damien Rider had just been told he’d be participating in Men’s Health Man. “I won’t be flying. . . I’m paddling down,” the 39-year-old informed us matter-of-factly.

Now, we could perhaps understand if “down” meant paddling across Sydney Harbour. But negotiating several hundred kilometres of untamed ocean between his home in Coolangatta and Bondi? We had to wonder, is this guy entering MH Man or MH Beast?

“The furthest I’d ever paddled before was 40 kilometres, and here I was about to paddle 800km alone,” says Rider, who broke three world records in his epic voyage. “I love the challenge of pushing myself to the very edge and finding out exactly what I’m capable of.”

MORE: Larry Emdur drops 13kg to claim the Celebrity title

He was to find out all right. While he could at least try to prepare himself physically for the sheer torture he was set to endure, what he didn’t count on was an escort from the local marine life. “At one point I felt a massive knock at the back of the board, and then I saw the fins,” Rider recalls. “I could see three shadows circling, which were later confirmed to be great whites. I just had to make sure I stayed on the board.” For most blokes that would be it, time to pull up stumps. Rider? He managed to make it to shore, where he rested for just half an hour before heading back out to sea.

Throughout his journey, Rider battled dehydration and hunger, once being forced to sleep on a beach as he simply couldn’t muster the energy to paddle to the next town for supplies. But you know the saying. What doesn’t kill you . . . makes you Wolverine.

“I just had to push through,” Rider says. “Then I would think, ‘Okay, that was tough, but I made it through and now I know can keep on going’.”

A victim of a violent childhood, Rider undertook the voyage to inspire and teach the children he supports through his organisation, Paddle Against Child Abuse. “There don’t seem to be as many problems in life when you do something you never thought you were capable of,” he says. “Things don’t seem as bad, because you can deal with a lot more. You become stronger.”

With his monumental journey and MH Man victory ticked off, the obvious question for Rider is, what’s next? “I’m still yet to find a challenge that’s too much for me,” he says. “I’ll keep testing myself until I do. That’s how you find out who you are.”

To see how Damien and the other six finalists got into cover guy shape, grab the May issue of Men’s Health – onsale Monday.