Only for the dedicated. Photo: Johannes Hohls
Following a recent surf session on a bright, clean, chilly morning on Vancouver Island, Canada, air 39°, water 48°, I’ve finally come to the conclusion that I don’t like surfing in cold water — and neither do you. Not really. Oh, sure, pointing to your shiny new flexible wetsuit you can confidently claim that cold water doesn’t bother you all that much, or that you’ve grown used to it, or that you actually like it. But that while you might actually believe that surfing in sub-55-degree water doesn’t bother you all that much, or that you’ve grown used to it, or that you actually like it, the cold, hard truth is that regardless of how much neoprene you might wrap it in, your body says otherwise. Most specifically, where surfing performance is concerned.
I should know, having been immersing myself in cold saltwater since first moving from Hawaii to the San Francisco Bay Area as a high school freshman, where I faced the harsh reality of Ocean Beach paddle-outs in a green O’Neill long john — the rubber equivalent of a flow-through tea bag. Years of ice-cream headaches followed: frosty winter mornings and frozen toes in Santa Cruz, cruel springtime upwellings along the Central Coast and Big Sur, Capetown, South Africa without a complaint, Rhode Island in December, unfazed by booties, hoods and gloves, Northern Iceland, air 25°, water 38°, still smiling at the end of Olafsfjordur’s long point wave.
Why it’s taken me up until now to stop insisting that I’ve got no problem with cold water is one of those self-identity questions we’re all faced with at some time or another. All I can say is that as soon as my fingers and toes thawed out after the aforementioned northern exposure, I decided to dig a little deeper into what I, and every other surfer wearing rubber from tip to toe today, is actually experiencing when we paddle out into frigid lineups and take on surfing’s supremely athletic demands.
I started with a 2019 study published by the Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies titled “The Effect Of Cold Water On Physical Performance.” Granted, this was a land-based study, but its findings at least established a baseline, with empirical evidence of the deleterious effect of cold water on basic athletic performance. Participants in the study ran a timed 40-yard dash, then had their vertical jump measured. Following 15 minutes of leg immersion in cold water, they were tested again, all almost immediately showing a marked decrease in both speed and power. A reduction in isokinetic strength was also reported (moving a limb at a constant speed while applying force against resistance, in our case, think pumping a surfboard).
Athletes perform better when warm than when cold — ok, tell us something we don’t know. Yet it wasn’t just the cold part, but the effect of cold water on performance that intrigued me. So, from this point I started looking for studies that went beyond merely dipping track athlete’s legs in ice water, but that might provide some empirical data more relevant to our needs as surfers. Couldn’t find any directly pertaining to surfing, but I did come across a study published by Frontiers in Physiology titled “Efficacy Of Closed-Cell Wetsuits At Various Depths During Military Training Dives” (hardly “It’s Always Summer On The Inside”, but it would have to do). This included some very dense analysis of seriously goosebumped training exercises performed at an unnamed Naval Ocean Simulation Facility — way too much to detail here.
But after trudging my way through almost all of its findings, a salient point emerged: while wetsuits (as opposed to “drysuits” utilized by all divers in really cold, sub-32° water) did maintain the subject’s core temperature above the level of potentially lethal hypothermia, where extremities (arms, hands, legs and feet) were concerned, temperatures very quickly “reached values where dexterity was compromised.” Keep in mind that these rugged Navy divers were wearing layered neoprene long-johns and jackets, comprising 10 millimeters of insulation. The study also showed that along with compromised dexterity, there was also a marked increase in stress response, neither of these responses lending themselves to surfing like (insert stylish role model here).
The stress experienced in cold water surfing is pretty obvious, but it’s the “dexterity” bit that really got me thinking. Even a perusal of the study makes it clear that while despite more flexible materials and design, the thickest surfing wetsuit, generally topping out at six-mm, may keep the core temperature up during a session of several hours (high enough, at least, to keep you from dying) dexterity, an absolute essential element of effective surfing performance, is compromised almost from the get-go — or at least the paddle out. Not even taking into consideration that, when sitting on the board, and even when up and riding, evaporative cooling insidiously overwhelms even the warmest suit’s insulating qualities, further diminishing speed and power.
In short, when it comes to surfing performance it’s stating the obvious to say that a good wetsuit makes surfing in cold water possible, yet so far as your body is concerned, it’s hardly preferable. There are, of course, certain surfers whose performances while wearing black Mickey Mouse gloves and peering through a neoprene porthole belie this fact — British Columbia’s Pete Devries and New Jersey’s Rob Kelly immediately come to mind. But for all those other surfers like me, who for years have been telling themselves that they “don’t mind” cold water, or that they can “handle it,” or even that they “like it,” the strident message their bodies are actually screaming every time they shallow duck-dive, crawl to their feet and bootie toe-drag on take-off, is basically, “If you really want to surf like you do in your imagination, then take me to Costa Rica, you fool!”
On the other hand (and I’d bet you knew this part was coming), one of the very best things about surfing, in any latitude and in any water temperature, is that its intrinsic attraction is only marginally based on any standard of performance. And unlike the inherent frustration that can follow a session in warmer climes, the kind in which your performance regularly falls short of your expectations, at the end of a ride under the Northern Lights in Iceland, or on a prime sandbar out in front of an eerily empty boardwalk, or through freshwater shorebreak slush in a big lake — or in my recent case, simply gliding toward a pine-clad shore under the imperious gaze of a bald eagle — you’re rarely left with the feeling that you could’ve surfed better, but rather a deep appreciation of what an amazing thing it is to be surfing; to be a surfer. And well worth the cost of not being able to zip up your down jacket with frozen fingers afterward.
An opinion held, I’m sure, by many of those surfers who regularly find themselves riding cold-water waves, often along some of the most beautiful coastlines on Earth, or perhaps close to home, but sharing those frosty tubes with a fraction of the summer crowds.
