Yes, I suck

I just read this really well written article about surfing, and sucking, and sucking at surfing, and it's like someone who is a much better writer than I could ever be summed up my attitude and ability when it comes to all things surfing.

I'm a vacation surfer. I get out once or twice a year, fortunate to be part of a family who loves warm water and climates, especially after a Seattle winter. What that means:

I "read" waves the way that a 2 year old "reads" his favorite books, meaning I can't read them at all. but can repeat what others tell me after they tell it to me, a lot. Most of what I understand about any break has been repeated to me by other surfers between sets.  They can accurately and intimately talk about the channels, faces, pitches, wind, underwater reef and rocks, and other key variables that make the character of the break. I listen closely to the minute detail they are providing ('look at the way that water flattens out on top of that submerged rock, it gets real shallow at that point, either ride down the face around it or kick out before it') and try to associate sentences to locations, instead of seeing and deducing the evidence in the water all around me.  As a result of this incomplete understanding, I  usually end up blundering into whatever section they're telling me to avoid at least once (Hello, submerged rock! Good thing you were covered in kelp to soften the blow!)

My tone-deafness extends from reading waves to catching them.  I can't read the feel and pitch of a wave well enough to know when to take off straight or angle in the direction of the break. So a lot of my efforts end up with me either pearling into the ramp or sliding off the back.

When I do make the wave, my popups suck, especially when I'm tired. I can't read the wave good enough to get up with minimal effort, so when I'm not tired I 'brute force' my way into the wave, paddle too long, and miss the best part - the critical section of the wave where all acceleration and set up for going down the line really happens. When I am tired, my  'stagger to my feet' method of getting up means I'm way too slow and end up trying to get to my feet when the board is racing and bumping in front of the actual wave, as opposed to gracefully springing up in the smoothest part of the wave right before it breaks. Pop ups are my crux right now. I'm obsessed with them, even though the next time I'll get a chance to surf is in August.

Basically I'm a total dork out there. I do have reasonable manners, and can get out of the way just fine, but I'm not that guy that can spot the wave, set up, take 3 hard strokes, bounce to his feet, and then dance across the face. I am scared to actually see how I surf. My wave riding is honed by 20 years of muscle memory from snowboarding, so I power my back foot and hold my arms out wide, elbows high. I'm pretty sure I look like an ape.

However.

When I do stand up, the feeling I get is the closest a non spiritual, data driven geek like me can get to God, or whatever powers the universe.  If I were more spiritual I'd know more about whatever that is, but spiritually speaking, I'm the village idiot, so all I've got are images and sound and feeling. Images of my board moving across the face, racing the whitewater and the sound of the wave, like ripping velcro. The feeling of the board underneath my feet as I pump and lean and adjust. And being suspended in a moment that lasted until I kicked out or fell off (option 2 - much more likely).

I'm still experiencing happy flashbacks from our our last trip to Punta de Mita. In that trip we stayed in a very low key, very nice surfer oriented apartment, where the proprietor took anyone interested to where the waves were breaking.  I lucked out and one of his favorite breaks had a really nice left. Since most people are regular footed and I'm goofy, I tend to get more lefts because there are more to be had. On a left breaking wave I face the wave and can see where to go as I move across it.  With that extra vision I was able to point and ride along the face, pumping up and down the wave with slow, sweeping, longboard turns. I'd let the board run out on the face, then gently guide it back into the whitewater. The left was long, really long, and I was able to get the hang of moving across the wave instead of just rocketing towards the shore. This particular break also had really long rights, which gave me the time to get the sensation and apply it to them after I'd mastered it on the lefts.

Just those small improvements- finally being able to travel up and down the face, moving down the line, understanding what was going on with the wave and working with it - made the vacation. In those moments everything suspended. All I had was the board and the wave and the feel of the sun and wind on my body.  I got out 6 days in a row, twice a day, and chased that fleeting sensation until my shoulders felt like they were going to fall off.

My one qualm about vacation surfing is this: I'm in a race, one I'm going to lose, with age. I can definitely feel it now at 48. I only have so many more years of surfing in me, and at 1-2x/year there is a limited amount that I can improve.

And to keep showing up I need to stay relatively fit. There is no training for surfing (even paddle boarding doesn't transfer particularly well), but being fit enough to go at it 2x/day, a couple of hours per session,  has required significant lifestyle changes, including running, paddling, cycling, weights, and (goddamnit) diet.

This is, I suppose, a reasonable price to pay, with decent side effects, like being physically fit. Every once in a while I fantasize about creating a lifestyle that allows me to live in warmer climes with good surf. But then I'd miss the other parts of my life - the snowboarding, the skate skiing, the road and mountain biking, and even the work, which right now requires that I am available in the office instead of telecommuting.

Thinking back on the article, and on this latest vacation, I believe that surfing for me is and will always be about being a beginner - and taking any progress as great progress. Sucking so badly at surfing means I lower my expectations, and from that comes a correlated rise in enjoyment. It's something I try to bring to everything else I do - that degree of openness and feeling can only be good.

Trumping myself on the Mt Catherine Loop

I think I post to this blog maybe 2x/year. So they'd better be memorable posts :) Well this one is going to be good, or at least memorable.  it's January 2017 and in this alternate reality Donald Trump won the general election. Holy fuck. No, really, holy fuck. His first week in office he signed executive orders to:

• Ban Muslims from all Muslim majority countries he doesn't do business with
• Build the south border wall and get Mexico to pay for it
• Start dismantling Obamacare and uninsure up to 20 million people
• Structure the National Security Council so that his Neo Nazi strategic advisor gets to sit on it, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff do not.

This is heavy, pre-apocalyptic, post democratic shit, and so tonight, instead of happily coding my 'spray GPS Data into Google' side project, or planning out my week like I do when I'm on my 'uber work achiever' game, I'm writing stuff down so I hopefully wont wake up at 2AM in a silent scream like I have for the past week wondering when shit is really going to go sideways, or if it already has and 5 years from now I'll be living in a cave, reminiscing about how it went sideways and I had no clue and didn't even appreciate the fact that we had internet and central heating and I was such a fucking punk.

There is only really so much one person can do -- and before you get all judgmental, let me just say that I went to my first protest, unless you count the one where I was walking around in a daze the day after the election and just happened to get swept into a protest march on the way to the bus stop. I really enjoyed it, and have decided I'm all about peaceful protesting.  I was even overcome with emotion in the middle of it when I started to think about my parents and how they came here with $9 between them and built an amazing life. I'm planning on making a regular thing out of protests, apparently there will be plenty of reasons to keep protesting. One nice thing to come out of all of this is that I'm pretty sure the next generation is going to be very involved in keeping America a Democracy, assuming we get it back to being one. 

Right now the situation is completely sideways pear shaped and when it's like that I sometimes just need to get the hell away from other people and sort my shit out. Really, it's my shit, I'm the one having the bad reaction to an authoritarian regime, and I've got to sort out what to do next, and I cant do that glued to facebook watching the fellow members of my bubble have a collective meltdown. 

I decided to get up to the mountain and go skate skiing. This wasn't a monumental decision - I mean I had done it a couple of weeks back, between Leela's soccer tournament weekends. But last time I went up it was purely for physical fitness. This time it was purely for mental fitness. 

The Mt Catherine Loop is easy. If you have a VO2 Max above 60 and the legs and back of a Norwegian ski champion. I'm clocking in at between 45 and 50 on a good day in the middle of summer, and have weak legs, a gimpy back, and a belly I can't seem to lose. So the Mt Catherine Loop is a fucking crucible to me. Today I decided to tackle the hard part, the grind up to the pass, and then head back home. The last time I did the pass it was about 5 degrees above zero and everything was numb. Sweat froze on my eyelashes and I got slightly hypothermic on the long downhill home. 

So it was a mix of dread both real and imagined that I rolled my ass out of bed and started pulling my stuff together. I had just gone out paddling for the first time in long time the day before, and my back, lats, and hips  -- all very much needed for skate skiing -- were achy in a way that Advil couldn't help. Fuck this getting old shit. I used to be able to go for weeks and now I can't even string 2 days together. 

I find that for the most part 'going through the motions' is about 80% of success for efforts like this. So I did that, even though I fell into reading about Donald Fucktron Trump and  ended up rolling out about an hour later than planned in a foul mood.

The start of the loop is a straight uphill slog to the trail, right under the chair of the main ski area. The snow had melt-thawed into a series of jumbled mini slabs that made gliding a distant fantasy. I lurched my way up the hill under the watchful and confused eyes of skiers and boarders, then caught my breath a bit before starting the prelude to the climb. 

The first section of the climb is actually a descent, where the biggest hurdle is navigating the throngs of snowshoers who don't really understand the concept of staying to the side of the trail. I usually alternate weaving through them with v2 practice, which is usually pretty shaky because of the suspect snow quality (those snowshoers know how to churn up a nicely groomed track). 

The second section does go uphill, but gently, in a way that builds false confidence. I usually drop into a rhythm, alternating sides in v1 and even picking it back up to v2 when I get up enough speed. 

That all ends in a hairpin turn that has me picking up the cadence a bit to negotiate the corner. Then it's solid left v1 to the next hairpin. I suck at left v1. I have no idea why. It feels like I'm falling off of a step every time I plant and step on my left side. I can sense squirrels and rabbits laughing at my pathetic left v1. It especially sucks when real skaters pass me, doing beautiful left v1 that looks like they're dancing the tango. I mean it looks that good. Fortunately these people are always nice, and always encouraging, even if it's actually very discouraging to get passed at speed by a guy that is flying uphill and not even breathing hard and can, in fact, toss out an encouraging sentence or two while I can only grunt-wheeze in response. Must be one of those 60+ VO2 Max guys on an easy day.

The next hairpin is the last, and that's not a good thing, because past that hairpin is where the shit gets real. From there it's about 2.5 miles of straight up grind. I can't do this without stopping. Lots. This time, in between stops,  I remembered my favorite part of Captain America, before the Cap gets turned into himself and he's a puny little geek and getting the snot knocked out of him by some jackass behind a movie theater. Cap takes a solid punch to the face, flies back about 5 feet, then gets up and says "I could do this all day". 

Thats what I think when I'm in endurance pain. I think "I could do this all day" and the pain doesn't go away, it just gets a little easier to deal with. I thought "I could do this all day" a lot today. I also just focused on stepping and committing to each stride, and really pushing with my legs and not my triceps. And I lost myself in all of that focus. 

I also lost a lot of the anxiety I've been carrying around all week. The thing about the mountains (and the waves, and the lake) is that they're just there.  They don't have an opinion, they don't 'like' anything, they aren't pissed off about the latest fucked up bullshit. They just take it all in and go...."Whatever". After getting all that angst translated into upward motion worked out  on the way up to the pass, I got to the top and I looked at Mt Catherine, and she looked back at me just like she always has for the past 10 years and I knew that even if I am living out of a cave next year and missing central heating and the internet because, you now, Apocalypse/End of Days, that basically life goes on until it doesn't.  I also realized for the 90th time that the mountain is going to outlive me, like she should. 

My dad used to say stuff like this all of the time and I'd look at him and think "that's really stupid" and maybe it is. But I find it comforting that I can go outside and let go of lot of baggage and basically get right-sized. 

So I'm feeling better. Not physically. Physically I feel like someone took a bat to my quads and back and lats. But mentally, I just wrung all that crap out of my head.