Day Twelve Revisted

So in the last post, I showed a lovely bruise that had been caused by a board-to-face incident and mentioned a video that I'd had problems getting to work. Well, I've decided to revisit the bruise and the video.

Bruise first. After thinking that the initial picture I posted was impressive, I woke up in the days following to find that it had gotten successively worse.

Day One:

Day Two:

Day Three:

Day Four:

Thankfully, it looks a lot worse than it is, although I am quite glad that I iced it as soon as it happened!

Now onto the video. I'm probably going to get a little technical here, so feel free to stop reading and just amuse yourself with my poor surfing antics.

First up, this is the video in full speed.

A mere 5 seconds of footage, yet there is so much that can be said about this. When trying to catch a wave, there is a mental check list of things to look for or perform. All it takes is one thing to go wrong and what could have been a successful ride can quickly turn bad, as so aptly proved in the video.

Lets take a look in slow motion and see what went wrong and what went right.

As we can see, as the wave approaches I'm angled across from it (0:02) so as to catch the face of the wave. If I had been pointed more to my right, I'd have ridden straight down the wave and headed into the beach. At 0:05 my arms come back ready to pop up onto my feet. At this point I'm now riding the wave, letting its power push me. If I hadn't caught the wave, I would still be paddling in order to get my speed up to match that of the wave.

At 0:06 I've pushed up to pop up onto my feet and by 0:08 my front foot is now between my hands. This is the start of the functional stance. Unfortunately, as I've rotated my hips to be aligned with the board, I've put in too much rotation and that has followed through to my shoulders, causing both hands to end up on the same side of the board. This overbalanced me by 0:10.

I still tried to correct this error by shifting my weight to my back foot and carving along the wave. The carve can be seen at 0:11. Notice how far out the water the nose of the board is, signifying that my weight is far back. Also observe the angle of the board as I turn it and the spray thrown up by it, all indicators of a carve.

Sadly, despite my attempted correction, I was unbalanced too much and fell.

It all came down to a slight over rotation, one small thing in a list of possible actions that I performed. The difficulty with surfing is knowing what actions are required for any given wave, and then obviously getting them right. But this does highlight the usefulness of video analysis. Without it, I'd never have known what went wrong here and how to correct it. I've learnt from it and as such, improved my surfing. Yay!

Apologies if this hasn't held everyone's interest. I shan't be going into such detail anymore!