Additional reporting by Tom Bing.
Surfing is fun right? How come it doesn’t always feel that way?
Recently, I had a day surfing a spot near home, the sun was out, the sky was blue, the wind gently pushing offshore and lovely peaky waves hitting a nice defined bank and peeling left and right with a really fun wall.
My board felt good under my feet and importantly, I was sharing the peak with my husband and two other friends, all goofy footers mostly taking the lefts. In a short hour of bliss, I hooked into more than a few lovely right handers all by myself and kicked out into the channel.
No crowd, no wipe-outs, no hold downs, just pure fun. When we have a surf session like this, it leaves us with a warm fuzzy feeling. What I was experiencing in that moment was ‘flow state’, a term first coined by The late Hungarian psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in the 1970’s.
‘Without Thought’ originally published almost 15-years-ago is still as relevant now as it was then.
According to Csíkszentmihályi’s research, “flow is most likely to occur when we find the perfect balance between our current abilities and the difficulty of the activity at hand. If a task is too easy, it fails to absorb our attention, so we become distracted, and our thoughts may wander to other preoccupations. If it is too hard, we start to feel stressed by the task itself. It is only when we meet the sweet spot in between that we find the optimum level of engagement – and all the pleasant feelings that come with it.”
This flow state is a meditative state, it’s a total absorption, a banishment of anxiety and thought. It’s a state we are incredibly lucky to find within the practice of surfing; but we don’t find it all the time. These sessions in surfing are what is known as Type 1 fun, instant gratification, dopamine hits. Type 1 fun is the type of fun we know is fun whilst we are having it. It’s not hard, it’s not challenging, it’s just enjoyment.
Those sessions do happen at all levels of surfing. From bodyboarding your first waves in the white water, to those days with perfect conditions with a couple of friends, hooking into fast-running walls. Those times we feel in control; not thinking, not challenged. Where our abilities are balanced to the difficulty of the task.
Photographer: McGee.
Sally, tapping into the idea of flow state and identifying different types of fun. Photo: Tom Bing.
Type 1 fun is something to be cherished; being in that flow state has fantastic benefits for our mental and physical health and is almost the payback we get for putting in the hard yards to feel confident and in control. Often though, isn’t always what pushes us to keep going deep down; that’s something else.
I had a session just before Christmas where, on the way to surf, Sandy Kerr [North East UK surf hero] rang me to offer me an impact vest. It was the biggest day of the winter by far. I was conscious I had a 7’2″ semi-gun in the van and the waves were going to be bigger, heavier and more challenging than perhaps anything I’d surfed before.
It was silence in the van down after that call. All nerves and bad thoughts going round in my mind: “lacking in ability, not ready, above my level.” I never rode a wave that day but I was part of something special. I went for one, didn’t make it down the face, took a pretty big beating, but survived. It wasn’t fun, but the cup of tea in the bath that night and the recounting of the stories in the pub a few weeks later were extremely memorable.
I remember having similar feelings learning to surf too, when, instead of being six-to-eight feet barrels over slab-reef, it was two-to-three feet faces over sand. The scale was different, but the feeling the same.
Sally’s son Billy and young Ruben Bleakley finding their own rhythm. Photo: McGee.
What pushes us to put ourselves into situations that aren’t ‘fun’? Surfing is supposed to be fun, right? Fun isn’t feeling nauseous, frustrated, exhausted, shaking with cold. If we think of it like one of those luggage scales, when you weigh your bag, the dial goes up to show the weight and the hand goes back down to zero again, but it leaves the second hand where the highest end of the reading was so you can see how heavy the bag was after weighing it and putting it down again to check it.
Every time we achieve something new in surfing, our needle is moving; but only when the experience is superior to the ‘best’ feeling we have had does it push that little red needle a little higher (and leaves it there).
That is our ‘Peak Experience’, that’s the thing that keeps us coming back, through the adversity, the cold, the beatings, the bad conditions, the work and family stress. We joke about being surf addicts, but it’s more true that we might like to admit.
Often our motivation to surf is to either try to match, or push our peak experience.
This is what’s known as Type 2 fun. It might not feel like fun at the time. We might not be smiling, we might feel frustration, we might even feel some pain, a battle, adversity. Type 2 fun is linked to adventure, discovery, resilience and perspective.
Non-competitive activities like surfing are deeply personal and are the perfect vehicles through which to experience Type 2 fun. It might not feel like fun, but we do it.
“Often our motivation to surf is to either try to match, or push our peak experience.”
Sally McGee
Often when we first start surfing we are satisfied and happy in our flow state, riding whitewater waves on a progression plateau. Until we are not, until something pushes our needle and alters our peak experience.
This is a key moment in deciding whether or not surfing is for us. If it is, and we are driven to continue that journey, then we need to be prepared mentally that we are going to have to start to switch between Type 1 and Type 2 fun sometimes in order to get the real deep satisfaction from what we are doing. As our abilities improve, in order to achieve flow state, we need to balance that with the difficulty of the task. Easier said than done.
So is surfing fun? Yes. It is fun, and it should be fun. Should we beat ourselves up if it doesn’t feel like we are having fun sometimes? No, we shouldn’t.
“Every time we achieve something new in surfing, our needle is moving,” here’s Sally, shifting more than a needle. Photo: Bing.
Surf media, surf schools, surf storytelling and often advertising from brands, particularly to beginner and intermediate surfers is often heavily focussed on communicating the feeling of Type 1 fun, without recognising the Type 2 fun required to get there, smiling faces in the sunshine on a surf camp, ‘whoops’ and ‘yays’, instant gratification. The problem with this is, that’s not always how we feel about surfing, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun. It’s just a different type of fun, possibly a more meaningful and long lasting type of fun.
Over the years of coaching through Yonder, I couldn’t count the amount of hugs I’ve given to someone crying on the beach. Sometimes when we look at the ‘messaging’ Yonder puts into the world via our social media, we realise it’s less about ‘fun’ than perhaps the deeper connection to our environment and to ourselves.
Why do we do what we do? Well it’s because of surfing, all that it has given us, all that it has done for us and taught us. When we pass on a love for it, we need for it to be on our terms, to build in activism or environmentalism to education around surfing, to contribute to and celebrate our culture of surfing, to respect everything that has come before us.
To understand the power surfing, the sea and nature holds and to pass that on with responsibility, integrity and true deep passion. The biggest thing for us in surf coaching and mentoring is the theme that comes up the most through the work we do.
It is not foot placement, hip mobility, strength, flexibility, ability even. It’s about concept, understanding what we are trying to achieve, why we are trying to achieve it and how we can start to achieve it.
Follow more of Sally and Tom’s journey by clicking on their names.
