Ep 14: Pro surfer Maz Quinn on Pushing the Limits

Maz Quinn is New Zealand's best known and most successful surfer.

A four-time winner of New Zealand's national surfing championships, and winner of the 1996 Billabong Pro-Junior Series, Quinn comes from a surfing mad family - his younger brother Jay and sister Holly have both won national titles, his mother is an advocate for Women's surfing and his father was a national official.

During the 1990s, Quinn took part in the World Qualifying Series and in 1999 Maz became the first New Zealander to win a WQS event and in 2001 he became the first New Zealander ever to qualify for the World Championship Tour, in doing so becoming one of the world's top 44 ranked male surfers.

In 2009, Quinn helped to stage the Quiksilver Maz Quinn King of the Groms, a national surfing event for youth.

In this interview Lisa finds out from Maz what it's like to be on the world tour, what the pressures are like, how hard it is to qualify, the setbacks and successes along the way, how it feels to surf alongside legends of the sport like Kelly Slater and how he faces up to his fears when surfing the big waves. Maz opens up about how his parents guidance put him early in his life on the right road and what life has been like after the lights went down and the circus of the tour was over.

He talks about women in surfing, the state of the tour now and what surfing holds for the future and hones insights from his sport for life.