"By the time I was exposed to drugs I was so in love with surfing and I wanted to surf the best that I could and that was the biggest focus in my life." Check out more Natural High Stories at http://naturalhigh.org Transcript: I grew up in Ojai California which is a small little town inland of Ventura about half an hour from the coast which as a kid seemed like it was a million miles away. We were always up in the hills, running the creeks and fishing and you know always doing something. We built a skateboard ramp in our backyard, um I always had horses. I rode my horses up in the mountains all the time. We played kick-the-can every day of the week and it was just kind of a small group of kids. We lived out in kind of a rural area at the base of most Los Padres National Forest. You know when we were little kids you know my dad andmom had us young so my dad was still kind of a kid when he had us. You know he was surfing on the weekends or going to rodeos up in King City or he was always doing something. He was just a big kid and he was you know he built some of his own boards and he loved to surf and and we just kind of followed him along, caught kind of, begged him to take us surfing with him. Oh first time I was exposed to any kind of drugs was probably like a sophomore year in high school. You know just started showing up at parties and there was always a crew of kids that would kind of sneak away and mean just, you knew you just knew something was going on that wasn't something I'd been around. I don't think I've ever made a conscious decision. I think that you know by the time I was exposed to drugs I was so in love with surfing and I just wanted to surf the best I could possibly surf and that was the biggest focus in my life. And I noticed that the kids are getting involved in drugs. Being a professional athlete you know we surf a lot. You know I noticed the guys that started getting into drugs, as time went on, those guys started to drag they started to lose their focus and their longevity just wasn't there you know and I think that was the thing you noticed, they just sort of start to, their priorities change and they started to fall away from the focus.The kids that continued to do that, you look at them a little at 20, you look at them at 25, you look at them at 30, and that's when you see the big impact. When you continue to do it and when it becomes part of your life and then you start surrounding yourself with those people that do that as a lifestyle, that's that's when the impacts happen but it all starts with that first time. You know I I grew up doing you know competitive surfing events. I loved it, but I found that the competition didn't make me surf better. It didn't drive me to surf better, it was the free surfing sessions when I was out with my friends, just pushing each other. And at the time there was really no future in that. There was no way to turn that into a living. You either won big contests or you or you know you didn't have a future in pro surfing. And so after all those dreams of making it in pro surfing I sort of let it go and move to Oahu and that's when it hit me, I mean that I found that big waves were something that I just came natural for me and I loved so much and and all this all stuff came together and the next thing I knew I went from going to junior college and and doing odd jobs and surfing just for fun to traveling the world with the best surfers in the world, looking for waves that had never been ridden and it was it was a dream come true. You know during the height of my surfing career I was traveling ten ten months out of the year. So and during that time I started to you know be lucky enough to be in some surf films, For me I was really interested in the filmmaking side of things and documenting the different cultures and the different people that we experienced and the excitement of documenting waves that had never been ridden. And I kind of fell in love with it. And in 1997 I had a really bad injury. The doctors said you're pretty much done. I said you know I love filmmaking and I've been around it enough I'm gonna go for it you know I'm going to I'm going to try to make this happen and went from there. Well, I've been with a company called Patagonia for about five years and I'm involved on pretty much every level of the company. I'm a sponsored surfer for them, I helped design board shorts, jackets, wetsuits and then I also do some film work for the company and help with the marketing. My name is Chris Malone and for me a natural high is being out in the ocean with my friends and family and if there's a ten-foot swell that's even better.