I went to the University the other day to meet a guy on the baseball team. They were having promotional events for various companies. One of them was a surf school. They had lessons marked down to a quarter of the price, so we signed up. I never really planned on taking lessons, I thought I would teach myself but I didn’t want to miss out on an opportunity like this one.
We went through a safety portion of the lesson, then through some of the basics and jumped in the water. It was raining off and on the whole time, I wouldn’t say the weather was great. It would have been easy to rebook or complain about the rain but when I thought about where I was at this time last year I welcomed the rain.
Once we were in the water we went through progressions to get our final result. It was hard not to try and stand up right away, but I teach the same way. You can get to where you want to be starting off slowing and progressing much quicker than you can if you jump into it right away. We caught a handful of waves on our stomachs to get the feel of the wave carrying us and then headed to the beach for further instruction.
We drew a surf board in the sand and practiced getting up….on the sand. Talk about feeling silly. They taught us the proper technique and sent us back in the water. I’m happy to say I did it, I surfed. Chalk it up as a goal reached. The first time I got up went something like, I’m up!….am I up? Am I doing? I’m surfing! Wipe out. I got up a handful more times which was a good feeling. Anytime you reach a goal you feel a sense of accomplishment. The day was great, we had an absolute blast. The German kid I went with loved it and wants surfing to be his new sport. As for me….
I’d much rather steal a base or hit a homerun. I don’t know if surfing is something that grows on you. I am happy I did it and that reached my goal. I’ll even go again when the opportunity presents itself but there are a couple other things I’d rather be doing.
Two main factors in reaching goals is, first setting one and trusting the process while making progressions