At some point, we all get beached: injury, work, responsibility. For me, it was six months out of the water for pregnancy.

I used to wonder why there weren’t many women over 30 in the line-up, until I had a baby. As the responsibilities of mid-life take over – mortgages, ageing parents, young children – you have to really want surfing in your life. And I did. I do.

So, what happens when we’re stuck in a season that’s begging for change?

•••

The gift of the glittering wave face contrasted with the tortured fingers and sphincter-smile of a try-hard is one of surfing’s great incongruencies. The very best wave riding appears effortless. Trying is anathema to style, or so it seems.

As surfers, we adapt our bodies to the places we play, and they shape our behaviours and our bodies. Unless you surf like The Duke in perpetual parallel stance, stand up surfing is an asymmetrical activity. One leg is forward, the other one is back, and this places different demands and loads on the hemispheres of our body. 

There’s nature’s shaping, and then there’s culture’s ever-changing preferences. 

The surf culture that I grew up in, of the 1990s and early 2000s, made it clear that trying hard was not cool. The meta story of surfing at the time was still very much caught up in manufactured binaries: sport vs. art, longboard vs. shortboard, Andy vs. Rasta, real surfing vs. women’s surfing, tradition vs. innovation, hippie vs. jock. Apparently, you had to pick one.

As our culture has come of age, we’ve seen the blurring of those new-old dichotomies. Look at Steph Gilmore, a currently freesurfing eight-time World Champ. 

I looked up to the Bruce Irons’, Joel Tudors’, the Rell Suns’ – they’re surfing with soft hands and relaxed ...