On Surfing for the First Time at 50

She bought the board on a Tuesday. Wetsuit on a Wednesday. By Friday she was in the water at six in the morning, gasping like an animal, hair stuck to her cheek, laughing in a way she hadn’t laughed in fifteen years.

She is fifty-⁠two. Two grown children. A small business that runs without her if she’s gone for a weekend. She has, by every reasonable cultural metric, already filled her quota of new things.

The ocean did not get the memo.

The lie told around forty

Somewhere between thirty-⁠eight and forty-⁠five, a quiet little story starts to circulate. It says: you are now in the maintenance phase. Don’t injure yourself. Don’t make a scene. Don’t take up something new — at most, recommit to the old. Walk. Stretch. Manage your hormones. Be reasonable.

It is the most boring story ever told, and it is told to women almost exclusively.

The women who refuse it tend to look the same in a particular way that has nothing to do with their faces. Something around the eyes. A friend of ours — the one who started surfing at fifty-⁠two — describes it as getting tired of being a sensible person.

What the ocean does that nothing else does

Pilates teaches your body how to hold itself. Walking teaches it how to keep going. Lifting teaches it that it is stronger than it thinks.

The ocean teaches it that it is small.

This is not a punishment. It is, for a certain kind of woman, an enormous release. You have spent thirty years being the responsible one — at work, at home, in the group chat, in your own marriage. You have been the calendar. You have been the spreadsheet. You have been the person who remembers everyone’s allergies.

And then a wave comes that doesn’t care.

You can be hit by it or you can duck under it, but you cannot reason with it, charm it, organize it, or schedule it for next Thursday. There is something almost erotic about being briefly out of charge.

You have been the calendarYou have been the spreadsheet

The body that doesn’t expire

The conversation about women’s bodies after forty has been hijacked by two camps. One says: optimize, biohack, freeze your eggs, defy. The other says: surrender, soften, accept. Both are exhausting in their own way, and both miss the actual point.

The body at fifty is not a worse version of the body at twenty-⁠five. It is a different instrument. The strings are tuned differently. It responds to different inputs. Some things it does better now — endurance, coordination, the strange ability to read a wave before it forms.

It also wants different things. It wants warmth. It wants water (the drinkable kind, the soakable kind, the salty kind). It wants to be moved through, not pushed through. It wants its softest parts — the ones most women have been taught to ignore — to be paid the same quiet attention as its face.

This is the part of the conversation the surfing-at-fifty woman would tell you, off the record, after the second glass of wine: I started taking better care of my body when I started using it for something I actually wanted to do.

The romance of beginning again

There is something in the West that has gotten very confused about who gets to be a beginner. Beginners are supposed to be young, the logic goes. After a certain age you are supposed to either be an expert or stay home.

The European read is different. There are seventy-⁠year-⁠old women in Biarritz learning to paddleboard. There are sixty-⁠year-⁠old women in Sardinia taking the boat out alone for the first time. There are widows in Greece who swim the same stretch of sea every morning at sixty-⁠five, the same way they did at twenty-⁠five, and have no intention of stopping.

The trick, the surfing woman would tell you, is not pretending you are still twenty-⁠five. It is the opposite — it is finally admitting that you are only fifty-⁠two, and that the second act is long enough to actually start something.

She has not yet stood up on the board for more than four seconds at a time.

She does not, when you ask her, seem in any hurry to.