Surf Your Best is a new, six-part Premium Originals series — included in your premium membership — which features legendary surf scribe and resident style doctor Nick Carroll introducing a unique and accessible curriculum to teach everyone how to improve their surfing, from the ground up. New episodes will drop every Tuesday for the next six weeks. Stay tuned. If you’re not already Premium, sign up for a free trial here.
*Schedule: 1. The Relaxed Upper Body: July 14th | 2. Angling the Takeoff: July 21st | 3. The Balanced Stance: July 28th | 4. Facing Down the Center Line: August 4th | 5. Riding on the Diagonal: August 11th | 6. Delaying Your Turns: August 28th
“One more piece in the puzzle”…
This is how someone I know described his latest flash of inspiration about some aspect of surfing. The bloke’s been surfing 25 years, which in itself is a lesson…here you are involved with a sport where it can take that long to figure out how to BEGIN.
But the “puzzle” metaphor is a funny one. It implies that surfing can be taught to you, bit by bit. Like, all this knowledge about it is waiting to be picked up and fit together, like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, and once that’s been done, the puzzle’s been solved, then your surfing experience is perfect, session after session.
Dude, not even the best surfer in the world feels like that!
There’s a reason why many experienced athletes regard surfing as the most difficult, overwhelming thing they’ve ever encountered. It’s because surfing’s less about Knowledge than it is about Awareness.
Surfing involves constant change. Nothing – not you, not your board, or the wave – stays in the same place long enough for you to really know anything about it. Instead, what’s required of you is a sharp awareness of the changes occurring all around you from the moment you paddle out, and how they fit into the bigger picture of the surfing experience on that particular day — because there won’t be another day quite like it, ever. Every surf you ever have will, start to finish, be unique.
I don’t want to try to teach you to surf better. I don’t even think that’s possible. Instead, I want to help you to teach yourself – to take the information here and carry it into the water with you, and figure out how to use it best in the service of your own vision of surfing, whatever it may be.
I want to encourage you to look at your surfing not as a jigsaw puzzle, but as something without an end. It will never be finished. The devil will be in the detail: getting your board right, getting a quiver right and keeping it long enough to enjoy, figuring out how to get time off work when you wake up to an unforeseen six foot swell.
But what I hope is that over time, you’ll find everything getting sharper…more focused…and every now and then, with a bit of luck, you’ll ride a wave and it’ll suddenly feel Perfect.
Surf Your Best is a Premium Originals series, and exclusively available for Surfline Premium Members. If you’re not already Premium, sign up for a free trial here.
Nick Carroll has been surfing for nearly 50 years and studying every aspect of it quite closely for most of that time. He’s had competitive success when he could be bothered, but more usefully has a lot of water time, in a very wide variety of waves, with a lot of very good surfers. He’s also written a great deal on the subject of surf skills over many years, including several sell-out books.
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