Forget about it. The next one could be your “best one ever.” Photo: Guy Kawasaki//Unsplash
One-hundred yards to your left, a perfect A-frame rises out of the mist. Fifty yards to your right, same deal. But strangely, regardless of which way you paddle, the swell vanishes, then reappears exactly where you just were. Never mind the fact that you’re gracelessly flopping around on what’s suddenly the wrong board and the wrong tide at the wrong break.
Face it: it’s a “Bad Session.”
If you claim you’ve never had an all-around bad surf, then, well, you’re lying. As for myself, I was recently reminded that some days on the high seas simply suck (relatively speaking). No, this doesn’t have to do with stepping in our new puppy’s vomit barefoot at 5 a.m., though that wasn’t so hot. I later finished off a fruitless, spastic surf session with what would’ve been a nice right. The problem was that when I popped up, my back foot found the one small spot on the tail where said dog somehow chewed off the wax. I went down like a sack of rocks.
Negative sessions may be scarcer for some of us than others, but they’re a necessary evil for everyone from newbies to pros. The question is: do we forget them and move on, or let them weigh us down, possibly plaguing the next dawn patrol?
Some would say that there is wisdom in the ability to put the bad karma behind us. Legendary soccer manager Pep Guardiola says that the greatest players he’s coached all have the unique ability to instantaneously forget mistakes. Top-tier athletes, he says, can miss five, ten times in a row; but the ability to forget the shots they skyed over the bar or bricked off the rim places them on another level.
Why is this skill so important? The players’ selective amnesia allows them to eliminate frustration or self-pity. Instead, they focus solely on making up for their mistake, sometimes instantly. In short, the athlete counters their folly by getting back up and putting the ball back in the hole.
The circular motion of surfing — the fact that regardless of a stellar or shitty wave, we immediately go back for more — means that wave riders are automatically in tune with this idea of resilience. However, that doesn’t mean that instantly casting away our screwups and misreads is easy. The more we want the wave, and the better the opportunity for an above-average ride, the worse it is to choose the wrong wave and take it on the head.
As someone who’s always had a short fuse, I sought to embody Guardiola’s philosophy when I last paddled out. It started easily enough. I grabbed a few long rights early on, and when I paddled hard and missed one, I simply told myself to put it out of my mind. I sat there on my board, lighthearted, knowing I’d grab another in a minute, and I did. A few waves later, I tried to take the high line and ended up missing the best section of the wave. Instead of slapping my hands on the water, I swallowed it down and grabbed the next one. Granted, it was a mellow mid-day session with plenty of waves and few people, but I praised Pep in my head. From Barcelona to Man City to Surf City – what a coach!
Then the waves dried up just as a bunch of people paddled out. When the next opportunity came, the pressure was on, I was in position, and I missed the wave. Admittedly, this was harder to forget. I started looking at my watch. My stomach growled. I remembered I had to walk the dog and work and do laundry and make dinner and…you guessed it, my next ride was about as smooth as sandpaper.
Perhaps, then, in surfing, Guardiola’s idea must also include the ability to turn off the conscious mind and enter a flow state, as opposed to worrying about work. Hyper focus on the task at hand but forget the mistakes.
The flip side is that a sense of frustration, or even anger, can sometimes push us towards success on the next wave — if we can use emotion to our advantage. In surfing and soccer, if I get a little pissed at my mistakes, I often play or surf with a little more grit. For many of us, though, myself included, overzealousness can cause us to try too hard and lose our balance, our sense of Zen.
Professional surfers, either when competing or freesurfing, do appear to surf with a lack of short-term memory. Granted, they don’t miss waves often, and they don’t fall as much as your average surfers, but during a heat or a critical situation, they must forget the missed maneuver, bogged rail, or epic hold-down and paddle for the next wave. If they dwell in the past, if they hesitate, the results can be painful, or worse.
However, great wave riders also have the ability to learn on the fly and adjust for the next one down to the millisecond, altering the tiniest angle. Guardiola’s prize players simply forget and continue to attack. Great surfers need to remember to adjust their takeoff spot, for example, based on the tide or the swell.
For the layman, trying to automatically forget our miscues is a struggle. I wasn’t always able as a soccer player, to quickly forget the ball I socked over the goal, the chance I’d squandered, and though understandable, it hurt my game. As a now-daily surfer, I still find myself working through the mental gymnastics it takes to “forget” the perfect wave I just butchered.
Surfers are notoriously hell-bent on grabbing that one ride during a session that delivers us somewhere new, the “wave of the day” that takes us far away from our lives on shore.
Yet, while driving that eternal chase, perhaps we should consider Guardiola’s idea of detangling from our mistakes. As a matter of fact, let’s forget everything we don’t need: every missed barrel or shaky bottom turn, every nosedive or time the leash looped your toe as you wheeled around. If we erase the shouts and the shame, the anger and self-ridicule, then perhaps we’re perpetually primed to score?
It’s more fun, anyway, to dwell on our friends’ mistakes, yell at them when they mess up — then snake their wave.
