Absorbed in a life of professional surfing, Dan Malloy rarely had the chance to explore the world the way he wanted to. Although Malloy expressed his great appreciation for the opportunities presented to him through his career as a professional surfer, he said how the action sports industry is portrayed is false in a number of ways.

Fans tend to clutch to the idea that athletes are immersed in the environments of the far-off locations they visit around the world for competitions—that they’re living a very laid-back kind of life. Malloy said for him, it was the opposite. When he was informed of a good swell or had to travel to compete, “I’d get on a plane, surf, then go right back home.” The lifestyle was far from relaxed, jumping from one surf hot spot to another, rarely absorbing the culture of each place along the way. The industry seems to focus mainly on the promotion of athletes in the world of overdone advertising, depicted as almost super humans gracing the covers of glossy magazines.

“A lot of what portrays the surfing world is pure fiction,” he said.

At one point, Malloy came to the realization that he was ready to change the way he traveled, attracted to something that stood in stark contrast from how he traveled as a professional surfer. And so the initial idea for Slow is Fast was born.

“It seemed to me like there were better ways to be in tune with the places I was visiting,” he said. While on a road trip with friend Kellen Keene from California to Oregon several years ago, Malloy brought up his interest in WWOOF (Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms). Malloy explained how he’d love to explore the world at a slower pace and make connections with new people, working on similar farms along the way. While he was inspired by the organization, the athlete realized he didn’t want to be constrained by any requirements along the way, but used the idea of farming while on a bike trip on California’s Coast Starlight, which runs from Ventura to Oakland, as his base idea. Keene was immediately hooked on the concept of exploring their home state at a slow pace. Additionally, they wanted to document the adventure.

“Once I told Kellen, it was happening. He really brought the trip together,” Malloy recalled. “And then I was left thinking, ‘What did I get myself into?'”

Unlike most of the action sports films we see today, Malloy didn’t want the documentation of the trip to be on the forefront of their minds while on the road. He said the goal was purely to have a good time—documenting it was secondary. “The number-one thing in the industry right now is for the media to come away with good imagery,” he said. “It seemed a little backward from the old stories of athletes and trips that inspired me. They were focused on having fun and, sometimes, there just happened to be media evidence.” Malloy went into the trip hoping to get back to that idea of pure enjoyment in a sport, which had been missing from his life for many years.

He said the entire idea for the project as well as its name was inspired by his years traveling in such a hasty, pressured way. “It was to force us to slow down,” he said. “I wasn’t saying, ‘Hey, everybody needs to slow down.’ It was specifically to myself, because I needed to relax. I know you can’t get great work done at a frantic pace, so we were trying to see what we could accomplish when we lived life [at a relaxed pace]. The takeaway for me was that it was far more enjoyable.”

But the roughly two-month trip that ran from August-October 2012 took a fair amount of planning. Malloy, Keene, and fellow companion Kanoa Zimmerman began contacting some of the people they wanted to stay with along the way about six months before the expedition began. “I was curious to know if we were actually going to get to spend more time with the people in each place and develop a true interest in what they were doing. Right away, it seemed that entering these people’s spaces, without an [objective], seemed like a good place to start.”

It worked. The three reunited with long-lost friends, became close and worked with farming families, hung out with musicians, surfed when they could, and camped along the way. Malloy said one of the biggest things he learned while on the trip was the massive impact conventional farming has had on small-town farming. “I’ve been interested in farming over the last eight years or so, but learned even more about it on the trip. It’s really [eye-opening] to see firsthand how large-scale companies have shifted the industry.” He said there are certain things in life that present an almost never-ending wealth of information to certain people. For him, farming has captured his attention. As someone who has taken on his own small-scale, personal farming, Malloy said, “I don’t think I’ll ever be a great farmer, but I want to be involved in some way.”

When the adventure came to an end, Malloy, Keene, and Zimmerman were left with a sense of satisfaction, but still felt the need to share their experience of slow-paced travel with others. “We shot a lot of footage on the trip, so we wanted to put something together. The book started out as a [compilation] of our memories and a way to say thank you to the people we stayed with,” Malloy said. “Initially, our expectations were very low. But then we got home and started working on it. I was spending a lot of time and energy on it. My brother told me I was putting too much into it for only 300 copies, so we thought maybe we should do more.

“We got a lot of assistance from Monika at Patagonia. She was really excited about the book and asked if we could do a small tour with it to different Patagonia stories. It kind of took off from there. Now, we’re almost out of 5,000 copies, which may not sound like a lot, but it’s far more than we expected.”

Aside from managing to get work off for two months, Malloy said what they did was unbelievably simple and cheap.

“Our biggest costs were a bit of bike gear and food. But that doesn’t mean you need to take two months,” he said. You can get an amazing experience like that in three to five days. Doing a trip like this is extremely accessible. It was a train and a bike ride away.”

Malloy said if your main goal isn’t mileage, intense training in preparation for a trip like this is unnecessary. “You have to not be in a huge rush and not expect anything,” he advised.

The result of the trip was a beautiful book of photographs and accompanying DVD that tells the story of their journey. Malloy’s introduction reads, “Mid-morning tomorrow we will get dropped off 100 miles north of San Francisco with our bikes, a bag of film, one surfboard, a few cameras, flippers, a two-man tent, and wetsuits. The pages that follow are a document of our 700-mile journey back home.” Visit Patagonia’s website to purchase the book and check out the project’s trailer below:

Images courtesy of Slow is Fast/PR by the Book