Benefit: Texas man loses 60 lbs from surfing!

Can we market this previously unknown asset?

The physical benefits of surfing have been, I think, clearly defined. It is good to be outside, not too difficult on the joints, burns a few calories and provides for short bursts of increased heart rate. That is mostly all. Every so often a therapist will come around and claim that surfing is good for PTSD or helps children with cystic fibrosis and while I don’t entirely doubt, still maintain healthy skepticism.

Surfing is fun but not real exercise.

Except two days ago the iconic Garden & Gun magazine posted an excellent story about the NLand Surf Park in Austin, Texas that is making me re-evaluate. Shall we read a snippet?

Around the end of last summer, Doug Coors realized that a dream he’d chased for decades had finally become a reality. The fifty-year-old great-great-grandson of Adolph Coors, of banquet beer fame, had caught the surfing bug in Hawaii in his early twenties. As a lifelong Coloradan, though, he couldn’t surf as often as he wanted. An engineer by trade, he had started sketching ideas for an inland surf park that would let him and other landlocked surfers ride waves year-round. His designs never proved viable, but he held on to the dream and kept looking for ways to make it happen.

Now, as he stood on a 160-acre piece of scrubby ranch land a few miles east of Austin, Coors looked out from a wide pier across a man-made lagoon the size of nine football fields, where seventy or eighty people on colorful boards were riding perfectly formed head-high waves that rolled across the water over and over again. Children were picking up new skills during weeklong surf camps in the gentler parts of the lagoon. There were guests who’d flown in from Florida and California, locals who’d become regulars—even one who, over the course of the season, had lost sixty pounds from his frequent surfing.

Sixty pounds is a proper amount of weight. Like real and it makes me wonder if surfing should/could be used as a magical new fad diet? There is money in them fad diet hills.

While I have you, it’s funny how much I think about Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch and how little I think about Austin’s NLand but it seems as if the experiment is working, and working well, in Texas. Seventy or eighty people in the water at a time? Plus, if you read the story, a craft brewery and above average hamburger? It sounds successful. But tell me, have you been? Did you enjoy?

And before you leave. What could we make proprietary about our new surfing fad diet? Boards with weighted undersides? Wetsuits that heat up to 200 degrees to melt those pounds away?

What?