The Complete Guide to Surfing

Chapter 1: What Is Surfing and Why People Love It

Picture this: you're standing on a beach at 7 AM on a Tuesday. The water is cold, the sky is gray, and you're wearing a wetsuit that took you fifteen awkward minutes to wrestle into. You're holding a surfboard that's longer than you are tall, and you have absolutely no idea what you're doing. This is not the Instagram version of surfing. This is the real version, and it's the one that this book is about.

Before we go any further, let's be clear about what surfing is on a day-to-day level. It is not the Montauk or Malibu footage you've seen in movies. It's not even really about those perfect peel-away waves unless you're very good and very lucky. Surfing, for the vast majority of people who do it regularly, is a grind. It's an hour of paddling for every ten minutes of actual wave riding. It's getting knocked off your board by a wave, held under for a few long seconds, and coming up gasping and spitting saltwater. It's cold. Your arms will ache in ways you didn't know they could ache. Your hands will be pruned and raw from the wax. You will scratch your forearms from belly-surfing over the board. And yet, people drive hours every weekend to do this. They wake up before dawn. They spend thousands of dollars on neoprene and fiberglass. Why?

Because there is a single moment, maybe five seconds on any