As I sit in the comfort of my family’s home in Kuala Lumpur with a silly, unnecessary scooter scrap on my left foot, resting from a visa run and debit card debacle, I think it’s time for me to write about a topic that I’ve been reflecting on for the past month: Why is learning to surf so difficult?
My personal surf progression experience so far (and my expectation of progress in the future since barrels and aerials are still a pipe dream :D) has led me to perceive surf progression in the form of a surf skill pyramid. I think learning to surf consists of skills upon skills built upon each other, much like a pyramid, where the apex of the entire skillset lies upon a strong (albeit relatively un-sexy) foundation.
I believe this pyramid captures why learning to surf requires a ton of perseverance and can easily consume one’s soul to become a life-long obsession.
Firstly, why is it so difficult? The reward-effort ratio of surfing at the beginning of one’s progression is abysmally low compared to other sports like snowboarding or skating. For any surfer, more than 95% of time in the water is just spend paddling, and the reward of riding the wave lasts no more than a few minutes per surf session. When one’s body isn’t physically conditioned to paddle, all this effort feels all the more like unrewarded torture. For an adult with limited energy and an expectation to succeed relatively quickly, it takes a lot of mental fortitude, psychological self-trickery or sheer blind optimism to push through this ‘torture’ phase of surf progression.
Not to mention surfing only begins to become truly rewarding once the number of rides per surf session becomes higher, which only can begin to happen once someone has mastered paddling, popping up and setting up the line consistently. The key word here being ‘consistent’. Developing that consistency requires a long duration of unrewarded surf sessions.
The next stage of the surf skill pyramid – popping-up is not as physically demanding in the endurance sense, but more so in the balance and flexibility sense. Learning and being able to pop-up quickly requires a certain litheness that no amount of endurance training can provide. Yoga and balance training on the other hand would be ideal for improving pop-up abilities.
Already we can see that the foundation of surfing requires two sets of different physical capabilities (endurance and strength vs balance and speed) in two different parts of the body (predominantly arms vs legs). In other words, a surfing body needs to be physically conditioned and ready in many different aspects before the rewards of surfing can be reaped.
The next two stages, setting up the line, speed generation and manoeuvres are the first forays into applying real surfing technique. I don’t have much to say yet about these stages, because I’m still in the process of mastering them.
However, I would like to add that sensory overload and time criticality are major factors in the difficulty of learning to set the line. Surfers only have fractions of a second to pop-up then decide what line to take to guarantee a ride down the wave. It takes repeated exposure to the same visual cues for the surfer to instinctively and instantly decide the optimal line to ride down the face of a wave, since they don’t have the luxury of time to rationally decide what to do next.
As for barrel-riding and aerial manoeuvres, I am definitely in no position to comment which is a harder or more rewarding skill to master. Maybe I’ll write about this again in the future if I even get close to learning either of them.
As for wave reading both in the line-up and during riding the wave, I think these are skills that can be endlessly perfected throughout a surfer’s lifetime, especially as waves get more difficult, large and critical. Not to mention, our judgment of waves are clouded by our emotions – the fear of wiping out
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Before I conclude, I want to elaborate more on the ‘skills upon skills’ aspect of learning to surf. I think that truly mastering a stage of the pyramid is contingent upon mastering the previous stage. This is simply because sufficient practice time for a certain stage requires sufficient consistency of the previous stage. For example, to practice setting up the line, one needs to be able to pop-up consistently, which requires one to be able to paddle to catch waves consistently. This entails that in every single surf session, a surfer can learn multiple lessons regarding the different stages of surfing. This can be too much new information to put into practice given the criticality of time, which is why it’s important to focus on only one or two points of improvement in each surf session. This an important takeaway lesson I took from Lombok Surf Camp.
So TL;DR: (i) Surfing consists of skills built upon skills (ii) The basic foundation of surfing is unsexy and requires hours and hours of practice (iii) Intuition and instinct developed over long durations in the surf break can overcome sensory overload
So, what do you guys think? Anything you agree or disagree with? Does another aspect of surfing deserve its own stage within the pyramid? Does an existing skill not warrant its own stage? I’m interested to hear what others think.
