The myth of learning to surf (or, Where da popup go?)

Good waves were forecast for today. A miracle: not the waves, but that I managed to get up around 6:15. Folks, I didn't even know it got light that early. Well, it does. And I think I got in the water the earliest I've ever been, before 8:00. I know, I know. Some of you can wake up and roll onto the beach. I don't do nuthin' without my coffee and my breakfast. I'm very proud to be out before 8:00.

Do you get the sense of how I'm being set up for gigantic disappointment? Here it comes.

First, more setup. The waves actually deserve the word "glassy." They're medium-size but gentle. The water could even be called blue today. The sun's out. It's on its way to 75, the warmest day of the year.

Did I also mention that I have been practicing popups in my living room for months? I've incorporated them into my daily routine. Everyone's told me to do this and I am doing it. I have gotten very good at popups in my living room. I do them every day before breakfast. I think I have no popup issues anymore like the ones you can read about in my archives here.

Here it comes.

I get out, catch a wave, and...it's like I've never done a popup at all. I cannot think of what to do with my arms, legs, etc. There is a second where I try to coordinate all these things, and I can't. I do the knee on the board, ass in the air, try to make my hands let go of the board and fail, fall thing.

The waves are good. I can't blame the waves.

But I'm finding it hard to catch them. How can that be, when they are good?

Not catching them kinds of feeds on itself, so that when I do catch one, I'm so surprised that it takes me longer to react, which makes it harder to try to do the popup (I think; I've always thought there's some kind of window of opportunity that makes it easier if you catch it at just the right time, but no one has ever confirmed that, so what do I know), and I can't.

Once I got on The Ledge again, another phenomenon which no one has ever been able to explain to me, and so I couldn't even attempt to stand up because I knew there would be a drop. After the drop I try to stand but it's impossible.

In the end, I spend much more time underwater than on top of the water on this beautiful day with fine waves. I swallow much more water than I'm accustomed to. On one wipeout I'm under so long I actually open my eyes underwater, which I never do. From underneath, the water looks brown.

In short, it's one of those days when you're miserable and more so because you have to watch everyone around you having fun. About as enjoyable as working in the "service" industry. Have you ever done that? I have. Something about constantly watching other people enjoy themselves while you're working hard and having none (whether waitressing or trying to learn to surf) grates on your soul.

I'm wasting my time, not learning anything, not having fun. I think for the five hundred thousandth time about how "learning" is an absurd word to apply to surfing. There is no such thing. It is impossible to "learn" something that happens in one-fourth-second intervals, simply because the mind cannot set down in memory anything that happens so fast, and so cannot analyze, interpret, repeat or learn from it. Most of the time I don't even know what happens on a wave or attempted wave; I'm underwater with no sense of how I got there.

And yet the fact is that people do learn to surf. And they do learn on this very beach, under these very conditions. I think of a woman who started the same time I did and learned in about a year and has been enjoying surfing all kinds of boards and waves for four years, while for me it's still a challenge just to stand up.

How can this be explained?

Lest you think I'm just a complaining, retarded spaz, I just read something in Surfing magazine that says what I've been thinking all along.

From an article titled Can Surfing Be Taught:

"One key to surfing's inherent unteachability lies in the way in which the human brain processes information. That complicated chunk of gray matter deals with what your senses are throwing at it on a number of different levels. Most normal stuff is processed through the frontal lobes, resulting in a seemingly unconscious, yet learned response: the thing we tend to call instinct or gut reaction. When something complex is happening to you very quickly, however, a thing called limbic response, controlled by a brain structure called the thalamus, jumps into action. It's a lot quicker off the mark than the frontal lobe, and its activation brings about a shot of energizing hormones, and the famed fight-or-flight response...

In a complex surf situation, like a late drop in on a heavy wave, you're either going to have a fight-0r-flight reaction or you're going to override it and incorporate the adrenalin into a gut reaction. Lots of surfing happens in a blurry mixture of fight/flight and unconscious trained response...

Now, the way in which most forms of sports training gets around this bastard is through repetition. A tennis player, for instance, can stand in a certain place in the court and strike more or less the same ball, over and over again, hundreds of times, while the coach looks on. The trained, seemingly unconscious response is etched swiftly into the brain.

But this isn't available to surfers. We have to make do with riding experiences that are so fractured and scattered it's ridiculous. Next time you surf, count how many waves you actually catch. Count how many of them allow you to do something similar. Three? Five? Imagine a tennis player being asked to learn by hitting five balls a day...and by the way, only when the tennis balls decided to show up."

Yet to say surfing can't be taught is not to say it can't be learned, and learned well, because people do learn, and in less than the 20 years it seems it will take me just to figure out how to turn (by which time I will be well into my 60s, so why bother). Why?

And even the good ones seem to concur with me and Surfing about the ineffability of it all.

To quote V., a male surfer of my age who has been doing it a long time and is very good:
"It's day-to-day."