Session 4.201 (49 more sessions to go)

Some of you who have been diligently following my WavLog might remember about this year?s goal of nailing the ?Roundhouse Cutback? for that matter a nice clean and strong cutback action. Around in September or so, I even said that I might nail it in October. Well, looks like I need an extension. The good thing is that I think I am making the progress towards it, but the negative side is that I still don?t have gotten the speed to do it.

What speed, you might ask.

From my perspective, I am totally lacking speed on every aspect of surfing right now.

• I am not still getting up on the board fast enough. This means that I am not getting a hold of the control of the board. This is not good.
• As a result of it, I am not gaining enough speed to do stay on the waves etc.

So this is really the part of surfing that each of the building block must be carefully and completely built before I can build further skill. The main problems now are;

• I am at is that the current physical limitation. To continue to move the skill up, I have but to train to get more power in paddling in and more agility in getting up on the board. This is easier said than done, because on a shorter board both of them require much more power and speed than, say, doing the same on a long board on a much mellow situation.
• The fear is playing up again. I need to get into bigger and faster waves. While I have more success in this area, the chance of succeeding is still far and few in between, and I do often need to get sand in my ears and drink a lot of water.

So, I really need to build up toward that goal from Physical, Mental and Spiritual aspects.

Speaking of the Spiritual aspects of it, I also now come to more realization that good surfing is not about concurring the waves but make myself become part of the waves. What do I mean by this? At least I can articulate this today this way. I think that I am still forcing a lot of actions and these actions are going against how the waves shape and move. I am reading the waves not as good as I wish I could. But it is difficult.

This difficulty is similar to playing music. I am an armature Jazz musician, and when I practice at home, I got a chart with chords and melody. When I play I do need to read ahead many bars to figure out what to do. On the waves, however, it is like I don?t even know what I am supposed to play next. When finally I decide to pick the wave, it is like someone handing me a brand new chart saying, here this is the first 2 bars of the song, I will give you next bars as soon as you start playing. It is like looking at the chart on a player piano role. Hopefully, I can play that chord and figure out the lines as they come up. So sometimes I try to out-guess what will happen next. Once in a while this works, and the ride is beautifully executed, but more often than not, I just don?t pick enough clues.

And that comes to being very creative on the waves, and that?s something even more fun than playing Jazz, and it is really cool to see some of the best creative riders.