I won’t bury the lede: it’s just not all that fun anymore. The bad seems to outweigh the good, and it rarely feels like a worthwhile way to spend a couple of hours. It feels strange for me to finally come out and say all this, since I’ve been surfing for 48 years and basically tailored much of my life around it. On the other hand, after reading the pathetic complaint detailed below, you might ask “what took you so long?”
Start with the pain. Like most surfers, I’ve occasionally spent time out of the water for injuries. Broken shoulder, broken foot, broken nose, broken wrists, cracked rib, two back surgeries, two knee surgeries. OK, so maybe I’ve had more injuries than some, but in every case, as soon as I was healed up (sometimes before), I’d get back in the water.
Yoga actually made it worse. I started doing yoga for balance, flexibility, and strength conditioning. I really enjoyed the relaxation, and the challenge of some of the more advanced poses, and I had a great yoga teacher. But like an idiot, I ignored the pain in my hips during certain poses: don’t be a pussy! It’s just yoga! As someone once said, scratch the surface of any surfer and you’ll find a dumb jock underneath.
The reason yoga made it worse because I’d been secretly blessed with developmental hip dysplasia,* which in my case turned standard yoga asanas into a bone-on-bone grind, ultimately leading to osteoarthritis. Out in the water, my trip down the lotus-strewn garden path translated to tightness, cramping, and pain in both hips after about 30-45 minutes. I kept things at bay by keeping surf sessions short, and taking lots of NSAIDs.
Meanwhile, other parts of my body had begun to deteriorate. Arthroscopic surgery on both knees made them arthritic too. I’d been in three serious car accidents (not my fault!), which screwed up my back pretty badly. When your lower back, hips and knees all sore, crampy and unreliable, it kind of makes it hard to surf. And that’s even counting the nagging little things like perennial ear infections and wrist tendinitis.
Aging and injuries can make even the littlest things you take for granted just that much harder. Like popping up from a prone position. Or bending your knees. Really basic shit. With time, even otherwise healthy bodies lose muscle tone, reflex control, and balance. It’s no accident that older surfers so often ditch their high-performance shortboards for longer, wider “fun” boards and longboards: they’re compensating. I resisted this evolution, and still do to this day.
The second point concerns location. My home break is Ocean Beach, San Francisco;
I rarely surf anywhere else. Ocean Beach may not be the steepest, most critical wave in the world, although it has its days. But it breaks pretty far out, and the paddle out is brutal by default. And since there are rarely any real channels, any slowness, hesitation, or mistakes on the surfer’s part can lead to a lot of duck-diving–or even a very long swim in, courtesy of a broken leash or board. (In the 90s, I always broke at least one leash or board every year.) If you’re young and fit, and/or hard-headed, you might enjoy the challenge of an Ocean Beach paddle-out. I know I did for 35 years. But at some point, eventually a thirty-minute paddle out through cold water is likely to be closer to an oppressive chore.
It’s often said that big-wave surfing is as much mental as physical, and in many respects I’d agree with that. I have average athletic abilities, but made myself comfortable with big Ocean Beach through sheer stubbornness. You can will yourself through many tough situations. Mind over matter! The reverse can be true too, though: a compromised physical state can mess with your head. After multiple occasions of, say, having a knee buckle suddenly, or your body strangely not executing the line you want to take through a wave that you’ve taken hundreds of times before, you may start to lose confidence.
I should not also that Northern California water is not freezing, but it is on the colder side. Here’s the CDC: “Older adults are more sensitive to cold and heat than younger adults.” It is what it is. The older you get, the quicker you get tired, and the more you are slowed down. You’ll see!
All physical and mental declines aside, I’d honestly already started getting picky about conditions. In my thirties, my rule of thumb was “if anyone is in the water, OR you if think you can make it through to the outside, you have to go.” I can remember countless days of surfing alone. But eventually I started cutting out the biggest days, or sessions outside of optimal tide windows, or days when the winds were suspect. I don’t know if this was due to boredom, or a time management issue, but I suspect it was really just stress mitigation. At some point, the hassle and the pressure simply began to outweigh the rewards. I was getting tired of the struggle, the beatings. So my upper limit of comfort began to come down. At the same time, I don’t like crowds, and I always found small days kind of boring, leaving me with a target of “clean 4-6′, and not too many people out.” Sadly, that’s no longer a very common scenario in the San Francisco of 2024!
And there are always people out at Ocean Beach now. Even if you’re not by nature competitive with others, it just kind of sucks to suck compared to everyone else. When everyone else in the lineup is 30 years younger than you, paddles faster, stands up quicker, positions themselves better, using stronger muscles, balance, reflexes, and stamina, it can be a little demoralizing. I’m sure some people are okay with being at the bottom of the pack. You could be content in thinking that back in the day, you would have been that guy getting that wave.
But even that is delusional, because the surfers of today are just better than the surfers of 30 years ago. That’s how it’s SUPPOSED to be. Surfers should, on average, get better every year. Now when I see surfers paddling out on what I think is a marginally ridable 10′ day, I think, what are they doing, there aren’t any good waves out there. Then I see them actually getting some good rides, BECAUSE THEY’RE BETTER THAN WE WERE AT THEIR AGE. It would be weird if it wasn’t that way.
Many of my friends stopped surfing some years ago. I told myself I’d surf Ocean Beach until I was 60, and I did that. I surfed here for 35 years. I guess that’s something. Yet it still bugs the shit out of me to see people out enjoying themselves on days that I pass on. My spirits lift whenever I see onshore winds, or slightly ragged swell, or giant waves, or packed lineups–any little hook I can grab onto to disqualify myself from having to go surf, so that I won’t have to face the obligation, the duty, the burden, the disappointment. Why can’t I get over this?
- a generic term for a condition in which the ball (acetabulum) of your thigh bones doesn’t fit neatly into your hip socket, often leading to frequent dislocations and/or early-onset osteoarthritis