Sessions 6007-8

Sessions 6007 (Sat 1/21) - 6008 (Sun 1/22)

It has been an amazingly difficult start of the year, and there are still some locals who have not even caught a wave yet since the close of 2005 until this weekend. Even for me, under the normal type of conditions, today would, and should have been more like session number 6015.

But, having had this type of situation was actually a positive for me, since I have started to think about training from a wider angle this time. Up to now, I only surfed and I did not do any other real conditioning. One area that I think needs a lot of reinforcing is the abdominal area. Surfing gives me good back muscles, but the abdominal part is used less, so I am ending up with fairly unbalanced situation. Other areas, I was told, is that there is not much weight bearing in surfing so it may not help in terms of maintaining healthy bones. Regardless of what the theories are, I think it is time for me to start adding more musculature in other areas, and also do more balance boarding, which has really proven to me a great help in adding more agility to weight shifting on the board.

In terms of surfing, the first day of the weekend was so-so. It was pouring early on that made the start time later, and then the tide was too low making it a bit more effort and time to find the right spot, but nevertheless, I did surf and did have some good results.

But the second day of the weekend was significantly fun. The waves were going close to or above head with a plenty of power on the outside, so when and if I caught these waves, it was really fun in our local favorite beach break. And thanks to these big swells of the past weeks, sand bars are well formed way outside than we experience normally in the summer, and this is actually one of the first times I am treated to these situations. This is something people talked about at surf shop conversation, and I did not believe this actually happens, but here they are.

The current was still horrendous like before, but I anticipated that took a long board out so that I can paddle at more ease. Try to do this in my 6'4 board would take a significantly more effort and time getting out, and so would catch much less waves. I also had to take some major going down the falls. But another thing I did was, I even anticipated that so I took out a soft board. This gave me an additional margin of safety so I could actually take a bit more risk in taking off on the things that I would not normally go for, and when some of the take offs worked nicely, the power and speed and the length of the rides were just not comparable to what I have been doing. I am hoping that in 2006, I will try to make myself an overall stronger surfer. Without this building block in place, I cannot improve other skills such as perfecting cut back turns and attempting and making more tricky moves consistently.