Session 5193-4

Session 5193-4

I was finally being able to hit the water this Sunday morning. I was really hoping that after this session the sinus congestion problem would completely clear. Of course, this is Monday and as I am writing this with a box of Kleenex next to I and I did not surf today partly because I had a busy morning and also to hopefully give my body a day to fully get rid of this issue.

This has really been a lower stoke season than the past.

The story should go back to Saturday because that was the Nor Cal women's surfing contest day and I actually did not end up showing up. The night before I had a business trip in Atlanta and I came back still with the sinus issue and I was really not in a mood to surf or do anything related to it. Yes, it sounds rather strange coming out from me saying that. But, I quite honestly, I was actually not in the mood to go out late, try to find a parking spot and then not really surf but stand around for the whole day sort of things. I will even admit that I really have become crowd phobic, and that's another reason why I pulled out of Santa Cruz shared apartment deal altogether last month. I must say that this is the phase that I am going through? I hope so. But if you talk to my wife, she know very well that I get extremely hostile and cranky, if she asks me to go to the open mike session at the Hang. I just do not see any point in going to the Irving district on weeknight after a long day of work only to drive around for 45 minutes to find a spot, get the musical instruments and PA out of the car, haul it, then wait for another 1.5 hours and play a single song in an "open mike" session. Conversely she does not see any point for me driving a day out to some spot on the coast, camp out, and haul the surf board down a 10 minute hike and surf, and come back and sleep without a shower either! So the level of "hassle" we are willing to go through are directly related to the Stoke within us.

Also I was looking forward to seeing a lot of my friends at the Classic contest earlier in August and that was a bomb too, since and except one local buddy of mine nobody else came to the contest either, and during the heat I basically go solo without anyone else present that I knew. Long after my wife and my co-worker friend showed up.

Hopefully we will make all of this up next year, I will be a much nicer person, and also hopefully I will even be a much more competitive surfer next year.

So instead of NOT surfing on Saturday, I managed to get up early and get out and surf with my local friends, and I was hoping some epic waves right here near my house. But of course the session was all mixed with poor condition and guilts of not showing up yesterday with my friends. In fact, the first spot was so sucky and too big and too unshapely that some of us got out and went to another spot. Since I took off my suit and put it back on, that constitutes two sessions. And at the second spot it was even worse than the first. So I ended up not scoring any rides! And that afternoon I got even more congested, probably I have irritated my internals more than what it was doing to recover from it.

So as for the surf goes, this weekend was more of the situation to gain from my mind disciplinary aspect than the regular surfing skill improvement type situation.

As the final stroke of the karma, I ran into the proprietor of the surf contest this morning as I was getting down to the beach to take this week's water samples at Montara.

Stoke 10