Hello Everyone,
Hugs to all :)
So, as you know, I dream to ride big waves within the year. And, my quest is on Mavericks. I realize that I am but at the bottom, the lowest of the low, the most basic of basic in all things. I have, but a dream, a dream learned while in the hospital under critical watch last Summer. Unsure of what the future held, let alone, the next hour. And so, I begin.
This blog of mine is my journal, my surfing training diary, so to speak. And with it, I am using it to help me shape myself, hone myself, tweak myself, until I am the surfer girl I can be. I truly love my quest for it is all that I have. It excites me. It thrills me actually, beyond all. I'm literally utterly, totally, and in all ways bodaciously stoked. And as you all know, oh how it feels so awesome. I am just so loving the ride, both on my board and, within my body. For I see surfing as not merely external, but as internal too.
In a way, I see myself as a lesbian in that my love is the sea and her waves. And I seek to unite with her. To feel her around me and within me, to be a part of her, to learn from her, to feel her embrace upon me and within me and to sense her very being. I want to know how she speaks. How she moves. Her moods and emotions. Her touch. I seek, empathy with her. I seek, unity through surfing. And my girl, she is Mavericks.
I have a long journey ahead of me, an impossible journey actually, for I am alone in my quest. Oh how I so long with all of my heart for a mentor, yet, even alone, I brave the sea for she calls to me with her breath, with her very being, and I can but not listen and heed her siren call and touch.
So the question is, how to up the ante, how to bring my training to the next level? A mentor, you know, that wise old man who can guide a girl through her own motivations and dedication, shape her longings, and hone her body, of such a man, I dream. Yet, my love is the sea and so, alone, to her, I go for I know nothing else. My quest calls to my soul, I have but no choice but to follow. Such yearnings come when one faces their own mortality, through pain and fear and the unknown. Lately, the last few weeks have been challenging, reminiscent of last Summer, yet, the greater my odds of failure, the more determined I am to succeed for I have nothing else.
I'm a live in the here-and-now kind of girl. I embrace the moment, I always have. For me, time slows and often stops, it seems. And such odd time events seem, for some reason, to be within my ability to experience them when needed. It comes not from effort, but instead, from surrender. And that is the lesson I see that the sea and especially Mavericks has to offer me too, pure surrender. For what else but to dance to her rhythms for alone, I am nothing.
To me, life is about movement. I just utterly totally completely and fully, with total unabandoned passion, plunge into and fully embrace both the internal and external in all things. I just love passionately any experience that has movement to it, it draws me, without words, in a secret language that only lovers of movement know, for it is within harmony, that one flows. This, of course, is both literal movement, and, stillness. Of all kinds. And my art for this, as some of you have read, is, Chi Gung. It is all I have. Well, maybe that and my desire. And my dream.
So my training is to center on what little I know, my Chi Gung training for it is all I can express with and all I have to offer and all I have to shape myself to learn Mavericks embrace. I can, it seems, be but, merely myself. So in purity and innocence, I offer myself to her touch. But first, I must train. My body. My mind. And, my spirit. A minimum of 18 hours a day. More, when I can. Every day. I am, determined.
As such, I will be focusing on that which I can figure out. A road, traveled by all of you who have ridden Mavericks already and who ride her still. Oh how I yearn for your wisdom and experience and guidance and friendship. Yet, in the meantime, I shall hone myself into iron, and then melt myself into sea water the best that I can.
My training program will be as intense as I can make it, I am, and have been, since this all began, pouring myself into my dream and vision as purely as I can. . Yet, I see ways to increased what I am doing even more as of this very evening. Even now, as I type these very words, my legs are held in the air, testing my quads as I type. I am sitting, at the moment, in a V position, doing my best to hold steady on my buns, my computer resting between my tummy and my legs. It's a challenging position to type from, I feely admit that, yet, doable if one but has the dream.
My focus, in addition to holding my silly typing position, is to calm my breathing. Currently, I am still right around 8 minutes 3 seconds for holding my breath underwater. I desire to increase that dramatically. I seek over 11 minutes. That, of course, takes time. As such, part of my training, in addition to being focused or flavored on Chi Gung, centers on freediving and the skills and training that art involves. My goal is to not only be able to hold my breath for a long time, but more so, to do so under stress. Thus, I challenge myself in every way I can think of to task any fear that arises before my mind. So far, I have faced my own unique fears, we all have our own of course, and I have faced through various odd situtaions and accidents, heights by standing on the edge of a cliff wall, about a foot wide and several thousand feet high, facing an alligator while in the water about boob deep with the beasty about 3 feet from me, facing a tiger shark, also, about 3 feet away and 3 different times that close, numerous close calls in car accidents, been stuck in the mud almost shoulder deep at the bottom of a lake unable to escape, and several similar odd events that have a strange way of happening, yet, at the same, time, allow one to know oneself deeper each time.
My training is regimented and disciplined, yet, with no guide, I can only imagine what such training involves. For my mind, I write in this blog type journal, as well as in journals I carry with me in my canvas satchel everywhere (along with my surfer's dictionary and a tide book or two). I am, as you all know, studying the language and the culture and the history of our sport even while I work and hone my body through countless situps, pullups, pushups, and paddling exercises. I love multi-tasking like that.
For my spirt, I am doing my best to learn about surrender. And the more I study the sea, the more she draws me, and the more I find myself listening to her deeper and deeper and deeper as I learn to surrender more and more and become more receptive with each wave and current.
For my body, I am doing unimagineable things. I am pulling large fallen trees, tossing and also rolling boulders, holding my breath, working each and every muscle in my body from every conceiveable angle. And, a new exercise today, disorientation exercises, consisting of rolling and somersaulting down hills, and twirling and spinning to learn to be as functional and aware while disoriented as possible.
I am riding my mountain bike, mountainboarding through the woods, surfing of course, starting swimming again up to 4 hours a day, and starting tomorrow, running as well as standup paddling, and paddling sprinting while laying on my board.
I am seeking balance training in every conceiveable movement I can, returning to my days of drunkey style kung fu, balance boards of all kinds, an electronic balance horse riding type machine, electronic surfboards, bosu balls, indo boards, slacklining, tightrope walking, stake standing, one leg standing, handstands both single and double hands, and flexibility training of all types using every imagineable rope and pulley and ballet bar and stretching machine I can find or make. In the case of stretching, I'm holding single stretches for up to an hour with just one stretch, allowing my body to sink and grow into each stretch.
And yet, even with all of this, I know I am but at the very bottom of training and the very beginning of where all of you Mavericks guys are. I have so far to go, yet, the journey thrills me, and since my journey is utterly hopeless and impossible to try to do by myself, the more it drives me on and spurns me to try harder and harder and harder with greater determination and ambition with each breath, each muscle contraction, each thought, each experience.
Oh, I forgot to mention diet. As some of you may have noticed, I am also religious in my diet in that it consists of fish tacos, fruit, and water, for the most part. Most every meal. Most every day.
The more I train for this vision of mine, the more I am learning about myself. The harder I try, the more I am learning to let go within each effort and to surrender to the moment with as little effort as possible, thus, increasing my quest for grace and beauty upon the wave.
The training is having noticeable effects on my mind. The harder I train, the faster I go, the more time slows for me each moment, allowing me, oddly enough to do even more with greater precision. A curious event, it seems. And oh so intoxicating to live in the moment between breaths, more so, between heartbeats.
I am finding the edge. The edge of my body. My mind. And my spirit. And the closer to the edge I keep getting, the further I am from it in that it gets infinitely smaller and smaller and smaller before me.
The more I am learning, the more I seek to learn, about myself, and, about the sea, about the waves, and about the weather, about the water, and about the land beneath the water. I am studying tides and currents and water temperature and every imagineable thing I can about surfing science. I am studying about shaping surfboards and I dream of new shapes each night and how to shape them and tweak them to infinitely tighter performance.
My world is drawing closer and closer into a world of surfing embraced by all of my senses, and the more I draw within, the more I see without.
Bodaciously Stoked,
Lily of the Valley
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