A Surfing Adult’s Baby Steps

It was a sunny day, the sky finally cleared up after a week of rain. Straight lines approached from afar, silhouetting dark blue shades with glittering water on top that looked inviting. Living on an island with inconsistent waves, and in a season ruled by the whims of the wave gods, I knew even before I got to the beach that today would be a good one. As I paddled out, I could hear the laughter and feel the energy gathering at the lineup. The right corner seemed to be a spot where both the energy of the water and the people gathered most intensely.

I was feeling extroverted today, which was not normally the case, and decided to paddle to that peak. A set approached, and I turned for the first wave. It had a nice taper from right to left, which looked alluring. I paddled, stroked, and glided. While I was on top of it, I saw the potential of it smashing me—and my little yellow board—into the sandbar, so I pulled back. I paddled back to the lineup and heard a father calling to his maybe 10-year-old kid on the second wave of the set, which looked even less friendly. "Come on, let’s go!" he said, sitting close to me as I paddled by. I saw a little thunderbolt threading beneath me, trying to find the right angle for takeoff. Then the wave hit the sweet spot on the sandbank and urged forward. The kid went with it. Two seconds later, I heard the traumatizing sound of water slamming into sand and saw his board flying up, then bobbing back down into the water. I heard the father giggle, like a kid who had successfully pulled a mean mischief on his friend. He then paddled to the peak of the next wave, took two strokes, rode it, swooshing and smoothing his turns, and kicked out where his kid had just ended up. They paddled back together. Both of them had wild grins on their faces. The kid shook his head like a puppy trying to flick off water.

”It closed on me!” he shouted, laughing.

“Next time you see a wave like that,” his father yelled back, "you take off, get low, and grab the rail. You don’t let go and maybe one day you will get barreled!” It made me wonder what would have happened if I had decided to go on the first wave.

It also made me think about what I was doing at the age of that kid.

One of my earliest memories involved me playing at the beach. My family still loves to tell the story of how I’d spend a whole day there, with no pants on, short-haired and wild. Whenever a small wave rolled in, I’d charge toward it at full speed, and more often than not, someone from the family had to rush in and haul me back to safety. I’d spend hot summer days on the beach, looking for crabs on rocks when the tide was low, and coming back to do the "running toward waves" gig over and over again until the sun set and whoever came with me was too tired. Then we’d head home. The romance with water came to an abrupt end when I was about nine years old and almost drowned at our local swimming pool. That traumatized me, and I refused to go back to the water. I didn’t learn how to swim properly until I was 17. I could swim properly, without fear or trauma, as I turned 28—the same age I began returning to the ocean and learning how to surf. And how is that going for me?

To this day, I can still recall that Wednesday morning in a warm September, somewhere on a remote island facing the Atlantic Ocean. I remember waking before dawn, lying in bed and not wanting to move an inch. I closed my eyes and saw a wave coming, building a blue wall, and within a second, the peak curved, dropped, and broke toward me. I opened my eyes. My whole body was aching.

Only three days in, and I looked like I’d been through a saltwater blender. My eyes were bloodshot, I’d broken out in a random allergy that needed a steroid shot from a doctor. I could barely move the left side of my torso, thanks to being tumbled underwater the day before. And the pain in my ribs? I didn’t even know that ribs could hurt. Surfing had properly introduced itself.

Standing on the balcony, the first ray of sunlight brushed over the mountain and lit up the ocean. I asked myself: Am I really starting this now, at 28?

Come to think of it, that wasn’t the first moment of self-doubt. Over the years, that emotion had become a frequent visitor, creeping into my brain whenever things got hard.

There was a time when I paddled out, saw a set incoming, and looked back toward shore. Everything suddenly looked so small. A wave came, lifted me, and that sudden lift scared me. I fell off my board.

There was a time I couldn’t get out past the beach break no matter how hard I tried. The wall of white water just kept rolling in, relentless.

There was a time I was afraid to look at the wave while paddling for it, and then too scared to go once I caught it. I ended up having wipeouts for a whole session.

There was a time I was too eager, going for every little wave, making weird drops, catching fins to the leg.

There was a time I was too afraid to stay underwater long enough for a clean turtle roll. 

And there was a time I almost broke my nose learning how to duck dive—the board, rather than going into the water, hit me square in the face.

Back then, after all those sessions, I’d finish the session, drag myself to shore, and sulk, feeling embarrassed and discouraged. My inner monologue turned into a loop of comparison starring everyone but me. I couldn’t imagine myself ever getting good at this.

So when did I become this anxious, self-conscious, overthinking adult? Maybe more often than we’d care to admit, maybe we don’t even know why we push ourselves. Is it ego? A need to prove something? A way to fill some vague emptiness? Or maybe—just maybe—it’s the simple will to keep going.

If I let you in a little more, maybe you’d understand the story I’m trying to tell. I was never athletic as a kid. Coming from an Asian family, athleticism was never a focus of our education. I was taught to deal with words and numbers, not to finish an 800-meter run or complete an 8-meter dive. I could pick up languages easily and calculate 66 times 66 in my head. But when I started learning to swim, I could only swim backward.

As a consequence of all these delayed physical skills, I made a decision as an adult: to train myself so I could surf better. So I asked myself: how does someone learn to surf naturally as a kid? And what would it take to catch up? I decided to train—swim, dive, skate, and surf—every chance I got. How hard could it be? I came up with a “master plan and a roadmap”: swim 400 meters under 8 minutes within a year, drop in and carve bowls within two, smash the lip the year after. All of it would lead to this version of myself I imagined—the stylish, skilled surfer I used to watch from my local beach.

None of them went the way I planned, and I’d never experienced this much frustration in my life.

When I first tried to kick my feet in the pool to propel myself forward, I actually went backward. My swim coach laughed so hard I could hear him through the water. He said he’d never seen anyone able to do that, except me. The one thing I was even slightly proud of was skateboarding, until I realized I’d been skating goofy but I surf regular, which meant learning everything from scratch again.

Most of you probably mastered all these things as a kid. So let me describe how it feels starting from the beginning as an adult. Dissecting my feelings, the most common ones were anxiety and embarrassment. Staying afloat felt impossible. Trying to stabilize myself on a skateboard just meant falling—onto hard concrete, wooden decks, or pump tracks—all of which hurt equally. Dragging a bigger surfboard to the beach took not only energy but also a bit of self-respect.

Then came a moment of realization. I was watching a pro kid training at the skatepark. He kept doing the same drill over and over again, seemingly unaware of anyone else but himself and his skateboard. He fell. He got up. Rinse and repeat. Each drop and turn became slightly more fluent. That day’s challenge was a hard one: drop into the bowl, attack the lip, stall for a moment, and rotate into a backside 180 re-entry. The first 40 minutes were all failures. His coach observed from the upper deck. Each time he came up for the revert, the coach shouted trigger words to help, but still, no success, the kid just kept falling on his side. It was the middle of summer, and everyone was dripping with sweat. Then the coach just stepped outside, picked a cicada from a tree, and placed it on the boy’s back left shoulder.

“Watch over your shoulder when you turn,” the coach said, placing the cicada carefully. “Otherwise, you’ll crash this thing.”

At the end of the story, the kid did land that drill. He was too exhausted to even celebrate, despite the fact that everyone was cheering for him at the skate park. The only thing that mattered to him after landing the drill was to make sure that cicada was still alive.

I don’t know if it was the cicada, the repetition, or the playfulness his coach tried to add. Maybe all of that. Watching him fall, try, fall again—and not care—made something click. I’d been taking every failure as a personal verdict. He just saw it as part of the drill.

I did not realize then, but something changed in me that day. I tried to enter every practice and training without my ego. I began treating myself, or at least my unathletic kid-self, with the same patience and playfulness. I stopped caring about how other people perceived me, or even how my own critical half did. I focused only on the movement of that moment. I tried to find my own cicada, something to keep me grounded, a quiet anchor to my movement.

Lucky for me, I’ve had a coach too—one of the most patient, grounding people I’ve met. He treats me like a kid sometimes. He knows when ego’s crept in before I do. Even now, when I’m out in the water alone, I hear his voice: "Poco a poco. You already got some nice waves, everything else is just a bonus. The waves will keep coming. You’ve got nothing to prove to anyone but yourself."

So I lower my head. I take one stroke after the other. And somehow, the waves do keep coming.

Ease of mind came exactly then. Underwater, I focused only on how the water reacted to my muscles. In the bowl or on the ramp, I focused on the connection between my feet and the board, and the angle of approach. Stroke by stroke. Pump by pump. I just tried to do a little better than the last one. I let go of my adult ego and let myself be where I was, and everything began to feel a little lighter, even the hard parts felt like play.

Don't get me wrong. This isn’t some hero’s tale about self-discovery through suffering, emerging victorious in the end. There were days when it felt like I was stuck forever on the falling part of the learning curve. I didn’t stop failing. I just started accepting it—and even laughing at it, sometimes like a kid would. I began to treasure the seconds I used to spend days chasing: the breath before a set arrives, the long glide into a wave, the healthy fear and joy as I leap from my board, the quiet pride that hums through my chest when I meet a rising wall of water with just enough courage.

Surfing brought me back to that little brave kid, running toward waves again and again—not for pride or progress, but simply for the love of it. These were my baby steps. And when I look back, they weren’t small at all.

While writing this piece, the doubt crept in again. Would this ever count as a real surf essay? Then I paused. Thought of my younger, naïve self. I giggled at myself, hit the submit button, and grabbed my board to check the surf.