When Life Hands You Lemons, Switch Your Stance!

Life comes in waves. Some days the waves are calm and peaceful, while other days the waves are dark and scary. Sometimes the waves get so angry and out of control that they threaten to hold you down for so long that, as you thrash to reach the surface, you worry that you might not ever take another breath. Oftentimes, experiences such as this leave individuals disinterested in stepping foot back in the ocean altogether. 

While it might make sense at the time, abandoning something so integral to your happiness isn’t always necessary. Instead, rather than just continuing to put yourself in harms way, it’s prudent to ask yourself if you might be able to change your approach so that you can continue enjoying life, albeit in a modified capacity. After years of struggling with chronic hip and back pain, one day I decided to see if there was a more gentle way for me to continue doing what I love, surfing.

I started surfing at the age of seven-years-old. Like most youngsters my age growing up on Pleasure Point, surfing soon became my life. Every day after school, I’d spend hours sharpening my skills, from cutbacks to floaters, eventually progressing to barrel-riding and aerial surfing. Before long, I was entering contests and surfing big waves. Over the years, I progressed substantially, so much that soon I was winning contests and even picked up some sponsorships. I was so stoked to get rewarded with free gear simply for doing what I loved best. It was a truly magical time in my young life.

Unfortunately, in high school, I began suffering from persistent back pain. Soon that pain spread to my legs, and after years of misdiagnoses and frustration, I found out that I had early onset arthritis in my hips due to femoral acetabular impingement. I was told by doctors that I should file for disability and give up surfing. The only consolation were the monthly prescriptions for extremely potent opiates such as oxycontin and oxycodone. While at first they seemed to dull the pain and stave away the depression, after awhile they turned against me. 

Instead of actively dealing with my pain and sadness, I used the medications to completely numb myself, making me reclusive and disinterested in engaging with life. I’d sleep in until 11, gorge myself on unhealthy food, and spend hours a day on Facebook, unconsciously advertising my mental health struggles through increasingly delusional status updates that looking back, probably made me seem like I was losing my mind. I guess I kinda was, in all honesty.

Relief came in the way of an arthroscopic hip surgery to clean the nasty bone spurs from my left hip joint. After recovering from the operation, I was over the moon when I started feeling good enough to surf again. Eventually, I progressed to the point where I started surfing at a high level again. I’d gotten my life back!

This wouldn’t last. Within a few years, the nasty bone spurs had grown back, and the same process was happening with my right hip. After attempting to suffer through the pain for a couple more years, it became clear that I would need another operation. Back to Stanford I went. This time, as I recovered, I feared that continuing to surf the way I used to would result in more unnecessary suffering and disappointment. This time, I decided to do something different.

After my hip healed, I decided that I wouldn’t give up surfing altogether, just in a way that would allow me to still get in the water while avoiding the stress being placed on my war-weary left hip. Naturally a goofyfoot, I figured that if I switched my stance I could mitigate some of the impact being placed on my left leg if I relearned how to surf as a regularfoot. That way, rather than using my left foot as a base and rudder, I could pivot off of the right foot instead. I knew that it would be extremely difficult to relearn how to surf this way, but it was better than not surfing at all. My goal was to surf switch-foot for an entire year, and I was determined to let nothing stop me from achieving it.

That year was brutal. There’s a reason that surfers, skaters, and snowboarders stick to one foot placement. Trying to hack your body’s natural stance is akin to attempting to change what hand you throw, write, or brush your teeth with. It feels completely foreign and ungainly. The hardest part, in those early days, were popping up. Getting to your feet while surfing is something that requires quick reflexes and highly-practiced muscle memory to master, and deciding to up and change your stance goes against not only years of conditioning, but your body’s natural inclination as well.

Most people enjoy a challenge, but this was extremely frustrating, to say the least. The act of popping up switch was so awkward and difficult that I wasted so many amazing waves get launched head over heels before I even reached my feet. Completely blowing the takeoff was not only a bummer for me, but for everyone else in the water who’d backed off when they saw me scratching hard to catch the wave in the first place.  For someone who’d not only reached a high level at such a young age, but earned free gear and the respect of their peers in the process, starting over as a complete kook was extra hard on my ego. Nevertheless, I stayed the course.

With time, my pop up became easier and I even started progressing to the point where I could do some primitive turns, if you could call them that. It wasn’t pretty, but shit, I was surfing again, spending quality time in my happy place with my closest friends. I wasn’t getting massive air or pulling into giant pits, but I was out there. Before I knew it, I’d reached my goal—one whole year of surfing switch. Instead of throwing in the towel, I doubled down and decided to keep the experiment going. 

One year became two, and two years became three. Towards the end there, I was actually surfing pretty damn good. I could nail some pretty late drops, rip into some satisfying turns, and even get a rare barrel from time to time. It was pretty satisfying learning all those basics all over, and this time from a different perspective, with my left foot forward. Unfortunately, the impingement in my right hip got so bad that I was forced to head back up to Stanford to consult with my hip surgeon, who gave me the news that I would have to head in for another operation, and this one wouldn’t be as easy. Later that year I went under the knife once more, this time for a bi-lateral hip replacement surgery at the age of thirty-five.

I learned a lot as a regularfoot. I learned that just because I wasn’t shredding with all the other gnarly rippers, I could still have a good time. I realized that my life wasn’t over, and that took a mammoth weight off of my shoulders. Not being able to take off on the steepest, deepest part of the wave, I also learned a lot of humility. I found myself rubbing shoulders with other fellow adult learners, even though I would have preferred to have been anywhere but the inside. Now on the same level, I began interacting and sharing space with surfers who I would have previously paddled past without a word on my mission to get back out to the top of the pack. 

Most importantly, I proved to myself that I was a true warrior, someone who could embrace change and adapt to the seemingly ceaseless mountains of bullshit hurled my direction on a daily basis with humility and grace. Now that I’ve got my legs back, I’m back to surfing at a pretty high level as goofyfoot. Titanium is pretty damn strong, as it turns out. However, I’m not out of the woods yet.

Sadly, I’ll be living with a significant amount pain for the rest of my life, so I need to be smart about what I subject my body to, like it or not. With that being said, I’ll continue riding the waves of life with courage, armed with the confidence that,  if necessary, I can always switch things up again.