Taking up Surfing after Kids

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Taking up new active sports successfully keeps me feeling young. Unfortunately the converse is also true. I tired snowboarding for the first time in my late 20s. Looking back it seems I was pretty young at the time, but I can tell you that 2 hours into my first snowboarding experience I was sitting by the side of the bunny hill, my tail bone bruised so badly I couldn’t stand up telling my boyfriend, “go on ahead, I’m just going to sit here and cry.”

This crystal clear memory came to the forefront when I was asked if I wanted to try surfing while in Costa Rica. Surfing? Isn’t that like snowboarding? I was asking three young, experienced female surfers who assured me that falling off a surfboard is far less painful than falling when snowboarding. Perhaps I should have located someone who wore a rash guard primarily to cover stretch marks rather than to actually fend off a surfing rash. However, I decided that like a canopy zip line this was not an opportunity to over-analyze—better just to give it a try and see what happened.

Well that was pretty much the strategy of the surf instructor as well. He introduced me to my surfboard and we headed out into the surf to see what happened. The only technical instruction he gave before getting in the water was that I should push up with my arms from my paddling position right up to standing, no kneeling in the middle. With that piece of instruction, I caught my first wave. Okay, so technically, he caught the wave for me—giving my board a push at precisely the right moment so the wave’s momentum and mine were aligned. I won’t pretend to know the correct terminology here—no lesson time was wasted on terminology, this lesson was about creating a feeling of success—just what I was looking for. Well success wasn’t my primary feeling on that first wave. For such a simple process —standing up— in a fairly forgiving environment (water is indeed a much more forgiving landing than packed powder) I certainly made it look difficult. Suffice it to stay that if I went through the standing up stage, no one noticed.

Fortunately we had a whole hour in the surf for me to figure out how to stand on the board and for my instructor to try varying approaches to describing what should or shouldn’t be done. Yes, take a quick paddle. No, don’t kneel. Yes, push up hard with my arms. No, don’t stand too far forward. Yes, stay in the middle of the board. No, don’t slip too far backward. Yes, just keep trying.

Okay, I won’t be catching in big waves in my lifetime, but by the end of half an hour I had paddled myself beyond the (small) breakwater, gotten turned around and with minimal assistance caught a wave and successfully ridden it in, in a standing position. And after a full hour I had ‘ridden’ several waves in, in what certainly seemed to me to be surfing.

Proud of my accomplishments I was met by a surfing friend on the beach at the end of my lesson. “Great job—you have a really interesting surfing style,” she called out to me. “Interesting? Is that a euphemism for wrong?” “Not exactly,” she replied, “I’ve just never seen any face forward while surfing before!”

Well sideways or not it felt like surfing to me!