Surfing is Awesome

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This article totally turned me on to the professional sport of surfing.

Freud on the Beach

Here's a quote from the text:

"Steven Kotler has argued (in his book “West of Jesus: Science, Surfing, and the Origins of Belief”) that there is a neurochemistry of surfing that tends to produce a heightened receptivity to feelings of transcendence. Perhaps there is no activity that is not potentially philosophical, but it has always seemed to me that the collision of (as Sartre would say) the in-itself (the wave) and the for-itself (the surfer), with all its possible outcomes of pleasure and pain (the wipe-out and the hold-down), and especially the tube-ride, with its narrative of being buried and then (ideally) re-born, naturally gives rise to a contemplative state."

How tubular. I watched "Highwater," a documentary about the "Pipeline" Surfing Event that takes place at the end of the pro tour every year off the North Shore of Hawaii (just happens to start around my birthday, December 9), known for having the largest waves and best surfing in the world. The waves come from a massive "turbine" created around the Aleutian Islands in Alaska between hot and cold air, the waves that hit the beach are pristine, never having crashed into another form of land since their birth. They are the largest on tour, but the event is different from "XXL"...

After "Highwater" I watched "Endless Summer" on Netflix. Filmed in 1966, "Endless Summer" is cool and weird. (free streaming on Netflix).

After watching footage from the Pipeline competition, it seems like all of the tricks surfers do do not really matter, because the quality of the wave ("catching a nice one") and the surfer's ability to escape the white water flood behind him seem like the most important factors in determining the quality of a ride.

Any surfers in here? Philosophy majors/minors, obscure sports-fanatics, stat-fiends? Surfing doesn't come with a lot of statistics, which is probably a good thing, because I would be staring at 3,000 cells of data in Microsoft Excel right now.

Surfers licking their chops/something to contemplate