Be best.
Should life-long mediocre surfers who strive to
improve upon said mediocrity for the first time as an adult be
relegated to the same surf caste as the VALs?
In turn, should these mediocre adult developing surfers (“MADs”,
if you will) who first attempted in earnest to improve upon said
mediocrity during the Covid era be counted among the reviled ranks
of the “Covid Surfers”?
Has the array of “internet surf coaching” programs that have
sprouted up like weeds in a neglected garden over the last few
years created this MAD phenomenon, or is this merely a symptom of
the overall MADness?
And, are these programs (we’ll refer to them under the penumbra
of “iSarf Programs”) actually as effective as advertised, or is
there just good money to be made by prolonging a problem under the
guise of offering a solution, much akin to hiring an outside
marketing consultant to promote an irredeemably sub-par
product?
This is a multi-part, deep-dive piece that will answer
absolutely none of these questions. This is 2023 after all—who
needs data or any modicum of investigative research when you can
have one man’s barely informed, shortsighted, anecdotal experience?
If it’s good enough for The Inertia, well then, it’s good
enough.
So what is a MAD and where did MADs come from? Again, you’re not
going to get actual investigative answers here, so I’ve created a
mathematical equation that seems like it might make sense, though
it has not and cannot be tested, empirically or otherwise:
Lockdowns + Mediocrity + Technology = MADness.
Lest I bore you with an in depth breakdown of each of these
elements, this is the gist—during the pandemic, people who grew up
surfing but never became incredibly proficient found themselves
with a lot of time and a little bit of disposable income, they were
painfully reminded of their own mediocrity via the Surfline Rewind
Cam and/or a significant other on the beach filming their awful
surfing, and then they thought they could use their newfound free
time to become better surfers by subscribing the iSarf Programs
that started popping up in their Instagram feeds.
In short, the MADs became duped by the same snake oil that had
already been successfully peddled to the VALs, i.e., that doing
stuff on land like skating around soccer cones was going to make
you a better surfer.
It’s a rabbit hole that I too went down, chasing that elusive
white rabbit of making significant gains in my surfing ability as
an adult. And I still might be down in that rabbit hole, so take
everything that I say with a grain of salt.
But enough with the exposition—swallow that red pill and let’s
find how deep this rabbit hole goes.
The iSarf Program: OMBE (a/k/a “Surf
Hacks”)
The Pro Surfer Owner: Clayton Nienaber
Website: ombe.co
OMBE first popped up in my Insta feed after a particularly
frustrating morning of surf at my local in the early stages of the
pandemic. It was almost as if the algorithm knew that my recent
purchase of the first pointy thruster I’d ridden in the better part
of a decade was going to result in sobering disappointment.
My research revealed that OMBE was owned and operated by Clayton
Nienaber, a South African former WQS warrior and one-time coach of
a junior Jordy Smith who moved to Queensland, presumably to start a
surf school.
This of course, is a lot like a Russian moving to Alaska and
having the audacity to purport to teach the Inuit how to make
igloos, as the Aussies are not a people who tend to suck at
surfing. Even the Hobbit Hemsworth, for instance, who is half a
foot shorter and half a foot wider than his more famous, better
looking, and more athletic younger brothers, might be able to lay
claim to surfing better than you (I daresay that he appears to have
fared far better at the Kelly Tub than Chas does here).
The OMBE concept is simple—you do things like stand on bosu
balls and pieces of cardboard with the goal of standing straight
forward on your board with your arms out in front of you like a
T-Rex. Next, you get yourself a surf skate and skate around some
soccer cones, making sure that you maintain this all-important
T-Rex stance. Finally, you go find yourself a bowl or a
quarter/half pipe and do some turns whilst maintaining this
aforementioned T-Rex stance.
There are also plenty of mnemonic devices to make sure that you
maintain this proper surfing form (e.g., imagining that you are
holding a coffee cup in one of your T-Rex hands) to surf stylishly
and like a dinosaur. This is all supposed to make you surf better
over the course of twelve weeks.
So, I bought myself a Carver surf skate and I followed the OMBE
program precisely to a T-Rex. To my surprise, after twelve weeks of
resolute reptilian repetition, I was still every bit as mediocre of
a surfer as I was when I started.
Perhaps my arms are a little too long vis a vis my legs and
torso to be able to surf like a proper dinosaur, though I have to
say, riding around on a surf skate pretending to be a T-Rex is an
undeniably fun time, even if it weirds out the kids at the local
skate park to such an extent that their moms threaten to obtain a
court order requiring me to stay at least 300 yards away
therefrom.
One day, when we are able to successfully merge dinosaur and
human DNA ala Jurassic Park sequels I’ve never watched, the ideal
OMBE surfer might finally be realized. Alas though, I am not that
surfer.
But if you are dino-curious, have very short arms, and have
access to some cardboard, a bosu ball, a surf skate, and some
soccer cones, OMBE just might your ticket out of mediocrity into
some serious Cretaceous-period style ripping.
In the next segment, we’ll cover an iSarf Program owned and
operated by someone was able to make it to and stay on the big boy
tour for a respectable amount of time.
Stay tuned!
After staying in the
Walker family for seventy years, it just got sold to Monaco
businessman Patrice Pastor, whose been buying up land in town over
the past eight years.
