The hardest part of surfing is usually not the biggest wave or the worst wipeout. A lot of the time it is one small moment: you suddenly feel like you just do not have it.
That feeling shows up in different forms.
When I first learned beach break, it usually came from getting smashed by whitewater until I started questioning my life choices. Without a coach beside me pushing and guiding me, I often could not even make it to the lineup. Back then I thought surfing was just catching a wave, standing up, and going forward. Once I actually got in the water, I realized that just getting out was already hard enough. You keep punching through, keep paddling, and wave after wave keeps landing on you. There is no real gap to breathe. I was not exactly scared in that phase. I was frustrated. Why could everyone else get out while I kept failing?
Later, at reef breaks, the feeling changed. A beach break feels like the ocean keeps rejecting you. A reef break can make you feel stranded. Big surf, strong current, no open channel, and suddenly you know very clearly that no one is going to fix this for you. It has to be you. The problem was that my paddling was still bad. In strong current I would often go nowhere. The worst part was not being tired. It was feeling myself work hard and still not move an inch. One wave would send me back into the impact zone and then I was stuck in a loop. I barely came up, then the next one was already there. A few times I honestly wanted to cry. The only thing in my head was: how is this still not over?
One time I was training with Nilbie. She saw I was close to falling apart and said: do not break down, it does not help, just keep paddling.
She did not tell me to calm down. She did not give me a big speech. It was just: do not break down. Keep paddling.
That line worked because when you are close to breaking, you cannot really process much else. Once your mind starts scattering, everything rushes in: am I stuck, am I bad again, why does this always happen to me. But if there is only one action left, things get much simpler. Stop judging yourself. Take the next stroke. Then another.
I have pulled myself back many times in the ocean with that sentence alone. Do not break down. Keep paddling. After a while it starts to sound like a command your body understands.
Last week I went to a wave-pool training camp in Hainan and felt the same thing all over again. This time I was not getting pounded by the ocean. I just suddenly could not surf.
I ride backside more often. Frontside hardly gets practiced. On the first evening, the moment we switched to frontside, I could not even get up. After a few falls, I finally stood up, then collapsed again for no clear reason, or came up shaky and dropped straight to the bottom. For that whole hour I barely thought about technique. My head was full of one thing: how can I not even do this. It felt worse because my backside had been decent right before that. One second you think maybe you kind of know what you are doing. Change direction and you are a beginner again.
The second day was similar. On the backside waves before frontside, I was riding pretty smoothly. I had mostly fixed my habit of looking down the wave during takeoff, and on a lot of waves I could get up the face and start moving. I had just started to feel that maybe the session was finally working. Then we switched to frontside, I fell twice, and that feeling disappeared immediately. The image in my head was ridiculous but accurate: a version of me two meters tall suddenly shrinking to about four feet.
What is annoying in that moment is not just the fall. It is how fast a small local problem turns into maybe I am just bad. It is only one direction I am unfamiliar with, but the mind immediately starts making it bigger. And confidence is most fragile right after it first appears. Two falls and it collapses.
I honestly did not want to keep going at that point. I wanted to go back to shore and take a break. But wave-pool time is hard to get, and I did not want to waste it. At the same time, if my head kept running why is my frontside so bad, my backside is fine, I cannot even stand up, and I still want to do turns, everything was only going to get messier. So I cut the target way down. I told myself: forget whether it looks good. Stop holding frontside to the standard of backside. Just stand up first.
The moment it got simpler, my body got a little quieter.
On the next wave I stood up cleanly, and I immediately gave myself a tiny nod: okay, at least I got up. I used to think this kind of self-talk was a little silly. After a string of failures, though, you really do need small and specific confirmation. Not fake encouragement. Just acknowledging that this one thing worked.
After that I gave myself only one cue: look toward the wall when you paddle, look where the face is opening. On the next wave I got up onto the face. It was not some grand breakthrough. It felt more like a knot loosening just enough for one thread to come free.
Back in the lineup I told Coach Dada that I could not surf frontside. He said: once you find the feeling of pressing through your back toes, you are there. That landed immediately. A lot of movements are not something you can do just because you understand them. You have to find the feeling in your body first. Surfing is like that all the time. The distance between knowing it in your head and being able to do it with your body is huge.
So after that I stopped forcing it and lightly tested for that feeling. A few waves later my frontside started to settle down. I could mostly finish the whole ride, and I even started to get a little acceleration on the face. The happiness was quiet, not explosive, like finding a door handle in the dark and realizing the door was right here. I was wearing a Florence Marine X jacket that day and joked to myself that John John Florence had lent me a little power.
On the third day I brought that feeling back to my backside. Funny enough, after getting wrecked so badly on frontside, I could see my backside problems more clearly too. By then I had already fixed my habit of looking down the face on takeoff, and getting up the wall felt smoother. But new issues were showing up. Sometimes if I did not load the front foot, the board would slow down. On backside turns I was not really sending power through the board either. My upper body turned, but my back foot did not finish the job.
Of course I wanted to fix everything at once. It is easy to get like that. The second you spot a few problems, you want the next wave to solve all of them and maybe look textbook while doing it. Every time I thought that way, I fell right after standing up. Eventually I stopped being greedy and gave myself only two jobs: pressure the front foot and create speed. Nothing else. After the board started running again, I slowly began testing turn power and angle.
That stage taught me something pretty hard: complex movements hate greed. The second you try to manage too many things at once, the body just freezes.
Frontside was the same. I had switched to a shorter board, so standing up had become hard again, which meant I had to shrink the goal all over. Get up first. Do not rush. Let the board run first. Do a little, then a little more.
Those days I kept thinking about confidence. I used to imagine confidence as feeling like I was good. Now it seems different. The more durable kind of confidence is knowing I can slowly learn what I cannot do yet. The first kind is fragile. You ride well for a bit and think you are fine, then two bad waves later you think you are finished. The second kind is not as glamorous, but it lasts longer. It does not ask you to be good every time. It only asks you not to sentence yourself immediately when you are bad.
Looking back now, the most useful thing I got from those days was not one specific move finally working. It was slowly learning what to do when I am close to breaking. Not gritting my teeth. Not pretending everything is fine. Just not letting emotion take down the whole system. Grab one action. Do one smallest thing. Pull myself from I am done back to what do I do next.
Surfing keeps throwing you back into a very unflattering place. You cannot do it. You are messy. You fall. You doubt yourself. You want to quit. There is no way to keep a polished image of yourself the whole time. Maybe that is exactly why it teaches this: when you are doing badly, do not turn on yourself first.
I could easily have kept surfing only the backside I am better at and left frontside alone. That would have been more comfortable in the short term, and it would have looked more like something a real surfer would do. But I do not really want that anymore. It is not even about being especially tough. I just know now that if I keep staying only in the places that prove what I can already do, new ability will not grow. A lot of the time the thing in front of you is not just difficulty. It is that you cannot stand looking stupid for a while.
Writing this, I keep thinking about Nilbie's line again.
Do Not Break Down. Keep Paddling.
For me now it is not just an ocean survival cue. When things are messy, do not rush to explain yourself. Do the next action. When you feel useless, do not rush to a verdict. Make the smallest thing in front of you happen first. A lot of breakthroughs are probably just that. The moment you almost stop, you do not actually stop.