Surf Check – Finding Flow, Switching Boards, and Making the Wave | May 1

Welcome to the very first episode of Surf Check, a casual, biweekly mini-series keeping you in the loop on all things Surf Société! Join host Laura Day for quick updates, surf reflections, and insights into what's happening inside our women’s surf community.

In this episode:

• 🌊 Surf Société Q2 theme: Finding Flow
  We're diving deep into connecting turns, exploring bottom turns, top turns, and cutbacks to find graceful, fluid movements on the wave.
• 📍 April Recap: Bottom-turn workshops and our favorite event, Kooks & Legends, where we analyzed surf clips with our mentor Paul Spooner.
• 🏄‍♀️ Upcoming Core Challenge: A six-week program with Dr. Alexis Pierru-Lee, boosting core strength and stability to enhance your surfing. (Prizes included!)
• 🎥 Personal Surf Reflections: Laura shares her experience experimenting with filming on a GoPro and riding two completely different boards—a longboard and a 7’10” fish from Almond. She reflects on the impact of board choice on surfing style and flow.
• 💡 Technique Development: This quarter’s focus is Making the Wave, emphasizing a holistic approach to surfing and maximizing every ride.

If you've ever felt stuck or plateaued in your surfing and want supportive insights and community connection, Surf Société is here for you.

Helpful Links:

• 🌊 Join the Surf Société community w/ 7 Days FREE
• 🎧 Subscribe to the YouTube Channel
• 📸 Follow @surfsociete on Instagram

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:08

Hey, welcome to this new mini series I'm creating. It's called Surf Check. I really wanted to do this because we've got the podcast, we've got social media, but there's nothing that's really like kind of keeping you in the loop on a timely basis. So here we are. Welcome to the Surf Check. I'm Lora Day. I did not grow up in surfing, so I created the Surf Society, a women's surfing community where we get together to learn more, surf better, and live happy for women who didn't grow up in surfing just like me and are super stoked to improve. Today is May 1st. Happy May. Thank you for joining me on this new series. We'll see how it goes. Finding Flow It's really inspired by being able to watch people surf or maybe you watch a bunch of reels or clips on Instagram or YouTube. You really see like that graceful movement of somebody on a wave where they just look like they're connected, right? They're connected with the wave. I talked about this topic with one of our mentors in the Surf Society, Paul Spooner. And he said, yeah, this is all about learning how to connect a wave through a series of turns. So this quarter, we're focusing on the bottom turn. the top turn and the cutback. What are the mechanics of these turns and how do you link them together to find your flow and find that gracefulness on the wave? April was all dedicated to the bottom turn. We did two workshops that were really great. We got together, broke down the bottom turn with our Surf Society mentor, Paul Spooner. And then we had a follow-up event after that called Kooks and Legends, one of my favorite events at the Surf Society. Essentially, we pull clips from Instagram that we're really inspired by or clips that any of our members want to bring in. And we break it down in like a really informal video analysis, question and answer type of environment. And it's really lovely because you get to hear what other women are working on and how they interpret these maneuvers. And it helps you think of surfing in a different way. It just gives you an opportunity to ask open-ended questions with a mentor, with somebody who is that legend. If you didn't grow up surfing you didn't have that person right so we had the bottom turn workshop and then this open Q&A and you get to use that information and let it marinate together and spend this time this month just thinking about your turns it's like such a great environment if you're trying to get better at surfing and you don't know what to do that's what we do we come up with the program and you come in and you join us in this community environment to just learn more get better get advice and be supported by an amazing group of women I'm going to read a review from the Kusum Legends that we had this last week because it was so good. So Lisa, thank you, Lisa. I love tonight's session with Paul. So appreciate having an expert share their knowledge with live footage of women surfing. So important to have access to this. And I so thank you. And Lisa, you are so welcome. Anyways, as for the Service Society, our upcoming events will be going into the top turn in May and also the cutback in, what's the next month? June. Oh my God, we're almost in June. But coming up next week, we're doing a core challenge with Dr. Alexis Pierulli. She's going to Work us for six weeks and we chose a core challenge for this quarter because it goes hand in hand with finding your flow, like having that core stability to be able to be on the wave and make the wave and surf it gracefully. For you ladies in the Surf Society, you're going to want to participate because you might win some stuff. you're not in the Surf Society and you're like, yeah, I want to work on my core too, you can come join us. I'll put a link in the show notes if you're listening to the podcast or in the description. I want to tell you how the Surf Society is affecting my personal surfing and share a little bit of insight with what we've been learning and like how it works in my sessions, what kind of differences I see, because obviously I'm I created this community and like I did it because I wanted to get better at surfing. This last couple weeks, the weather hasn't been great. It's spring in California. So we've got a very early morning window and then like sometimes a lot of wind and we've had very low tides in the morning before the wind comes up and it just hasn't been ideal. So I've only gone out a couple times. I'm primarily like a longboarder. So one of the days I did go out and I just wanted to try to get some footage for fun and it was really small. So I took this out with me. It was really hard to surf with this. I've never done that before and it's really difficult. So thank you guys who suggested to me to do like the mouthpiece. If you're listening to the podcast, this is a GoPro case with a big handle. So I'll put some footage of that. You can see me trying to figure out how to surf with one of those. So that was one of my sessions. And then just to contrast that, I've also been trying out different boards and one of the boards i've been riding lately is a 710 fish from almond and completely different and i love how it ties into what we're talking about at the surf society with finding flow because the flow and those two boards so different since i primarily ride longboard a lot i feel super comfortable with the turns and longboards usually move really slow and And the fish, so different, you get into the wave and it just like throws you out. And if you're not ready to turn or you don't really have those mechanics down, you kind of miss some of the best parts of the wave. And I have loved just thinking about like the difference of the switching up the boards, the styles and what it requires of me. One of the things that we have really been focusing on in the Surf Society, it's called our technique development portion. Every single quarter, we give you like one task, one thing. If you show up to the workshops and you're like, this is too much. I don't know. This is so much info. You get one thing that you get to work on and you can just take that with you all quarter. And the goal is that you get to improve by focusing on that one thing. So our technique development this quarter has been making the wave. I Yes, we all want to do these maneuvers. We want to do these turns. We want to do these things. But it's about taking a holistic approach to surfing the wave and milking it as long as possible. I love this because as Paul said, talks about it in the workshop you don't have to like deeply focus on trying to do a maneuver to learn it and if you focus on making the wave and taking this holistic approach to surfing the wave your body and your brain will take all of that experience as information and processing so then when you go back to actually try to do the maneuvers and start to learn these maneuvers you already have a sense of flow that's something i've been thinking about in terms of what that means for a longboard and what that means for something more like a fish. Very different style of surfing for me. I think the best thing is we always have a space in the Surf Society to go back and talk about these concepts. You can go out in your session, gather this information and come back and you're not alone with it. You're not sitting there just trying to figure it out. You have somebody that you can talk to, whether it's the other ladies in the group that just make you feel seen because they're going through the same thing or it's asking a mentor or listening to the conversation or watching the the replays. It's a really special place. If you are wanting to get better at surfing and you feel like you're stuck, you feel like you've plateaued, you don't know what to do, next, come and learn with me at the Surf Society. You are exactly who I created it for. If you want to catch up with me more regularly, subscribe to this channel if you're listening to the podcast episode there'll be a link to the youtube video in the show notes and then yeah come back here in let's say two weeks and try to do this every two weeks i'll let you know what we're up to with the surf society i'll let you know how my core is doing after that core challenge and we'll learn more surf better and live happy together so