Training dates: September 26–October 7, 2026
During these twelve days of training in Siargao, I worked with several coaches, each with a very different style: Ben, PJ, Remar, and Vincente. Among them were active professional surfers and retired surfing legends. I learned an enormous amount. There was progress, but there were also plenty of details my body had yet to understand or put into practice. Those would take longer to absorb after I got home.
If I had to distill everything we worked on into one underlying principle, it would be this: shortboard surfing is, at its core, a sport built around speed.
All those maneuvers that score highly in competitions depend on speed. From the first paddle strokes and the pop-up to every pump and turn on the face, the aim is to generate speed, maintain it, and use it where it matters.
1. From Waiting for Instructions to Finding the Peak Myself
On smaller days, the coaches focused on teaching me to read waves and paddle into position on my own.
As a beginner, I had been used to lying on my board facing the direction I wanted to go, waiting for the coach to choose a wave, give me a push, and tell me when to stand up. This time, they all insisted that I sit up and face the incoming swell. From the moment a wave started taking shape in the distance, I had to judge whether its size suited me, whether I wanted to catch it, and where the peak was. With an A-frame breaking in both directions, I also had to decide quickly whether the left or the right looked better. Some waves looked promising at first, but I needed to work out whether they would open into a clean face or close out almost immediately.
Making the call was only the first step. Moving into position was harder. A good wave would not necessarily come straight to me. If it was forming some distance from where I was waiting, I had to paddle toward it—“paddle up”—then quickly sit up, pivot the board, and paddle back with the wave—“paddle down.” Sometimes, to catch a left, I first needed to paddle diagonally toward the peak, then straighten the board as the wave approached and put in a burst of strokes before popping up.
The whole sequence demanded strength, endurance, and agility. In constantly moving water, I had to judge both the wave’s timing and my position relative to it. Training was brutal. I spent a lot of time out there frowning in concentration. After an hour of paddling, my arms would be so sore I could barely lift them. Then I would look at my watch and realize I still had an entire hour left.
There was also a moment during a paddling correction that was funny and exasperating in equal measure. I had the endurance for long paddles and a reasonable base of strength, but lacked the explosive burst needed to catch a wave. Once my hand went deep into the water, my stroke rate was particularly slow. The board could not keep up, and I would miss the wave. My coach told me to move only my shoulders and keep my core steady so my body would not rock from side to side. That, he said, would make paddling more efficient and easier. Easier for them, perhaps. I was so intent on holding my core still that I barely dared to breathe, worried that even one belly breath would make the board wobble. Watching my cautious, breath-holding expression, the coach seemed torn between laughing and losing patience.
2. Get the Beginning Right, and More of the Wave Opens Up
Alongside my lack of paddling power, another major problem was my slow pop-up.
I had always used a two-step pop-up. With a relatively weak core and a pear-shaped body carrying more weight in the lower half, I was naturally slower getting to my feet than men or apple-shaped surfers with more explosive upper-body strength. In fast waves like those in Siargao, being half a beat late could mean missing the best opportunity to make the first move on the face.
To help me get faster, Ben suggested battle ropes, the SkiErg, and freestyle swimming for explosive power. He also wanted me to practice pop-ups on land every morning and evening, until the correct movement and speed became muscle memory. In the water, PJ, Ben, and Vincente took turns watching closely and correcting the details.
It was also on this trip that I finally felt I had found the right physical moment to pop up. Before, I would either paddle with my chest lifted the entire time or stay pressed flat against the board. Neither was right. The moment to pop up was when the board began to follow gravity down the face and the nose tipped slightly downward. The coaches gave me a useful cue: if I felt I was just about to miss a wave, tuck my chin. That would bring the weight of my head forward, put a little downward pressure on the nose, and let the board pick up speed down the slope. Once I moved into the pop-up itself, though, my chest needed to lift immediately.
The takeoff direction also needed to be set in advance. Ben emphasized that, for a left, the board should point either straight down the face or slightly left; for a right, either straight down or slightly right. I had to watch the face while paddling and adjust the nose before getting up, so the takeoff could flow into the first move.
There were plenty of smaller details to work on, too. A ganglion cyst limited the mobility in my wrist, and slow-motion footage still showed that I was not bringing my hands close enough to my body or getting my legs underneath me quickly enough. But I was deliberately correcting a few old habits: bring my legs together before the pop-up instead of leaving them splayed; place my hands close to my lower ribs and abdomen, away from the rails so I would not instinctively grab them; look firmly in the direction I wanted to go once I was up; and get my hands off the deck promptly. Moving slowly only made it easier to lose my balance.
The coaches also deliberately took me to fast breaks such as Quicksilver, forcing me to speed up my takeoff. After adapting to that pace, I would go out the next morning at a bigger but slower break and feel noticeably more confident and composed. I was beginning to understand this through experience: the earlier I got the movements right and took the initiative on a wave, the more completely and smoothly I could ride it.
3. Surfer, Board, and Wave in Sync: Linking Speed and Turns
Once I was up and on the face, a softer wave gave me room to drop down, gather speed through gravity, and then climb again. On a steep face, I needed to take off at an angle and move along it straight away. Since I often did not have enough speed to begin with, the next essential skill was pumping.
I used to think pumping meant simply pressing up and down on the board. PJ explained it in a way that finally made sense to me: it was a process of compression and extension, using gravity on the face while the board traced a slightly rising and falling line. On the way down, the emphasis was on pressure through the front foot; on the way up, it was on lifting through the upper body. I could not let my upper and lower body move around haphazardly at the same time. Some part of me had to remain relatively stable so I could find my balance through those fast changes in height.
Raymar pointed out an essential detail about foot placement. When pumping, my back foot needed to move a little farther forward instead of staying planted at the very back of the tail pad. On a longer board, it could even come off the pad entirely. The farther back I stood, the more it acted like a brake. I needed to learn to move my feet as the rhythm changed.
The size of the pumps also had to change with the wave. On a softer face, I needed a larger up-and-down movement, using more of the wave’s height to build speed. When a section was breaking quickly and looked about to close out, I needed compact, higher-frequency pumps to get through it and reach the clean face ahead for the next move.
Where I looked often determined how well the movement worked. Frontside, my shoulders were already facing roughly the right way, so looking a little too close did not throw me off as much. Even then, I needed to look farther ahead; otherwise, my shoulders would begin to turn while I was trying to accelerate, making the pumping less efficient. Backside, the problem was much worse. To watch the face, I would turn my head and bring my shoulders around with it. My body ended up twisted, caught between trying to turn and trying to pump. Backside pumping already felt awkward, and I could barely generate any speed. PJ gave me a small but useful cue: look much farther ahead, along the line where the wave face extends into the distance. That helped my body move more smoothly and build speed.
Practicing pumping was about more than gathering enough speed. It was also about developing a shared rhythm between me, the board, and the wave, laying the groundwork for carves, roundhouse cutbacks, and snaps. At first, I had thought of those turns as movements that simply slowed me down. Later, I came to understand them as a way of redirecting kinetic energy once I had enough speed: engaging the rail and carving through the water to bring my momentum back from the shoulder toward the pocket, where the wave had the most push, ready for the next move. I could not force a turn just for the sake of doing one. If I did not have enough speed, I needed to keep pumping or use the drop toward the bottom to build it.
I still had several coordination problems when linking into cutbacks and other turns. Sometimes my back foot moved too slowly during the transition from pumping to turning and did not get back to the end of the tail pad in time. The coach would keep shouting from shore for me to shift it back. Other times, even when I consciously opened my shoulders, I could not coordinate that movement with the weight transfer between my feet and the repositioning of my back foot. The turn lacked power, or I would lose speed after the first maneuver and have nothing left for the second. To help me find a rhythm, Ben gave me a simple count: “Pump, pump, turn—pump, pump, turn!” I had not mastered it yet, but I was finally beginning to feel the rhythm of the face.
4. Breathe Out the Fear and Feel the Excitement
The other major breakthrough on this trip had to do with fear.
Before coming to Siargao, I had written a post called [The Wave Didn’t Kill Me, but Fear Almost Did](https://katechi.ai/en/posts/the-wave-did-not-kill-me-fear-almost-did), and I had spent time working on my fear outside this trip as well. The waves were small during the first few days of training. I could stay calm and carry out the coaches’ instructions, and I thought I had already put that struggle behind me.
Then, with four days left, the swell picked up and the fear returned without warning.
The waves that day were less than thirty centimeters bigger than on the previous days. But as I paddled out and saw how much steeper they looked, my heart began to race and my hands started shaking. Pop-ups that had become reliable suddenly failed one after another. I stopped and sat on my board in a safe area, completely confused. In the past, I had known what I was afraid of. That day, I could not identify it at all. The fear seemed buried somewhere below conscious thought. Once my heart was racing and my hands were trembling, I would automatically look down and grab the rails during the pop-up. I felt so frightened, frustrated, and miserable that I nearly cried out there.
After talking with the coach, resting for a while, and taking my mind off it, I managed to get back to normal for the second half of the lesson. That evening, I talked it through with an AI and followed its suggestion to get an early night. I knew the real swell was arriving the next day.
The following morning, with three days left, the coach took me straight to Stimpy’s, a break that had already left me with bad memories. Waves were rolling in one after another, getting close to two meters. I felt myself unraveling again: my heart rate climbed, and my body began to shake involuntarily. Ben told me to stop, work on my breathing, and not overthink it. “Breathe out the fear. Feel the excitement instead of the fear. Focus on the movements. These waves are fast, so your pop-up has to be faster!”
Honestly, hearing that did not make me feel better immediately. What actually took the edge off the fear was a proper wipeout.
I lost my balance on a big wave, fell to the bottom, and got rolled around twice. But when I surfaced, my first thought was: “Oh. That actually wasn’t so terrifying. I can handle that.” In that instant, I became completely calm.
Then I caught the most memorable wave of those last few days. I popped up decisively and dropped down the face. At one point, I nearly lost my balance for a second, but instead of stiffening up and falling, I instinctively reached out, brushed my hand along the face beside me, and steadied myself. I rode the whole wave. The lip was curling overhead, and I felt as though I had almost slipped into a barrel. When I came out, I was so excited I could barely speak. I was close to tears in the water.
That wave changed the rest of the session. Before it, big waves would bring back enough tension to distort my movements and make me cautious. Frontside or backside, I would cling to a high line, and before I had even thought to turn, I would already have raced out onto the shoulder, wasting the face that was still available. After that wave, I grew bolder as the session went on. My takeoffs were smooth, I had no more wipeouts, and once I was riding, I even had enough attention left to start trying turns.
More surprisingly, that confidence stayed with me through the final two days. On the last day, at Salvacion, I faced right-handers close to three meters high—my backside—and remained calm, making almost no mistakes throughout the session. We got into the water before it became crowded, and I was not only pumping and turning backside on those nearly three-meter faces; I was linking the movements together.
When I left Siargao, I felt that the biggest obstacle to my progress had finally disappeared. Fear used to leave my body so tense that I could neither improve consistently nor bring myself to try new moves. As the fear receded and my body relaxed, the techniques I had practiced over and over finally came alive on the face of a wave.