Johnny Cash once sang, “love is a burning thing.” Meatloaf once sang, “I would do anything for love.” John Lennon once sang, “I am the walrus.” The point these late, great musicians (not to mention many mediocre musicians) were trying to make is simple. Love is all consuming.
Not unlike the love most hardcore surfers have for surfing itself. All consuming. You can’t just be “sorta be in love”. You love completely – or not at all. Them’s the rules. Them’s the science.
See where we’re going with this? As we well know, love doesn’t necessarily only apply to romantic love. Indeed, you can love your friends and family, your pets, your cars, yourself (just putting it out there), you can love playing other sports and watching sports. You can love your clothes, your stamp collection, beer, speaking in tongues, getting someone to scratch that awkward spot on your back, you can even love your vintage collection of creepy-as-hell porcelain dolls.
Nonetheless, today Trident is obviously speaking about the love we have for surfing.
Valentine’s Day is just past and with roughly 50% of the world’s men still in kak ‘coz they sorely disappointed their partner, yet again with their feeble attempts at romance on the day, Trident thought we’d take a deeper look at love and how it can also apply to a pastime such as surfing.
Love is partly the brain’s goofy juice going nuts.
Endorphins. Dopamine. Serotonin. These are just some of the feelgood hormones related to the biology of love. The very same hormones are also implicated when it comes to that invulnerable feeling one gets in extreme sports. Indeed, there are folks out there who completely ignore the emotions and psychology of love, and state that it’s all just a biological trick of the brain. Now, Trident will instead suggest these people have the imagination and soul of a collapsing shed and/or have never been laid in their lives, but one thing is for sure. Said feel good hormones, including something called adrenaline you may just have heard of, are released while surfing.
In fact, it has often been suggested that the inconsistent reward aspect of surfing equates to much of its appeal. We know it’s not perfect and beautiful every day, not unlike your relationship. In fact, sometimes it’s damn unpleasant and you’d rather hide out in the garage and throw darts and drink beer until the storm passes. Surfing or love relationships? That’s for you to decide – Trident refuses to dig their own grave any deeper. Surfing, like love, rewards the participants. Love and surfing elad to self-fulfillment, a sense of personal achievement, wellbeing, caring for something other than oneself, a feeling of working towards a future, a permanent goofy smile, wax rash. Sometimes sheer bloody exhaustion.
And of course, just like love; loving surfing has its ups and downs. There’s never a guarantee even a classic wave in perfect conditions will guarantee a good surf. Sometimes, average or even poor conditions can offer the most fun. If we were correlating this with love, it’d seem even a gorgeous partner is no guarantee of a good relationship. Of course, it therefore follows that those days in less than ideal conditions thus refer to a partner as attractive as roadkill. That’s not our point.
