Here’s a new’ish painting inspired by Shaun Payne in Indo, his father’s awesome surf coaching and the nice people at the beach resort.
It is oil on canvas with wild garlic and rosemary olive oil with marker pen and is small to medium size.
Thank You
Archive for the 'Learning' Category
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After hitting a peak fitness level and taking some time off to rest I’m now back into my regular training again.
I took about two weeks break from all my sea sports and even from swimming.
I just did light gym and stretching.
The last couple of days I did a mix of training: swimming, surf paddling, running, cycling with some short and light kitesurfing and surfing sessions.
This felt good – mostly taking it at about 10 – 50% and relaxing into a moderate endurance groove.
Yesterday I stepped up the endurance a bit as an experiment. I did lots of little sessions with lots of resting and eating between. The total training time probably worked out to about 6 hours but most of this was little more than walking exertion. It felt good. But by the end of the day I really felt nicely tired and needed to eat quite a lot.
I slept really well in the night.
This morning I feel a fair bit of that lactic acid fatigue. After training most days for two years it takes quite a lot to get this feeling so it feels like an achievement. I quite like this kind of mild pain as I feel that I have earned it and that I am improving. After a few slow days I’ll be able to take it further and this feels inspiring.
Enjoy the African Summer 🙂
I’ve taken a few weeks break from kiting. I took some time to surf full time around JBay in South Africa. There is something magical about this area. This history, the people, the culture, the vibe. I love it. I did score some dream sessions and had a couple of magic dolphin rainy sunrise dawny experiences with a good friend from my local break.
I got some really good new surf gear after riding really old knackered stuff for some years and this felt pretty good too. Then I over did things and surfed myself out a bit. After this I took two weeks off and didn’t surf at all. I just chilled out, played some music, did a little painting and some light gym and talked a hell of a lot of crap. I had lost a bit of weight following the overtraining and the crash following it. So I made sure that I got enough to eat and I’ve mostly got the weight back to what it was before. Now I feel pretty good again.
A couple of days ago I went for a walk with my mother and her dog near my parents home. There was a light breeze blowing and I had a new super cheap one line kite from a little toy shop to try. It was fun but proved really tricky. One line kiting is a real art. It’s like a zen thing. It reminds me of my childhood flying kites on beach holidays with cousins and friends. The last time I flew a one line kite was with a friend in Finland quite a few years back. He’s a bit older than me and has a kind of real Finnish man thing about him – extreme but strong and calm. I was just getting into kitesurfing and found his zen meditation approach to kite flying really refreshing compared to a lot of the power crazy jumpy kids and typical blokes that usually seem to be attracted to the sport.
Rock on Ilka. Maybe we fly a kite somewhere again some time soon’ish.
Have fun
This is a painting I made in high school, way back – must have been about 15 or so years ago. It is acrylic on calico stretched over cardboard and is quite small. This painting is in the Alexander Shafinsky Collection, a London based Russian collection.
Since I like making pictures like this and I need money (being a starving artist) I’ve decided to start taking commissions. If you would like a surf and/ or other related painting, big or small, mural or miniature, seascape, sea sport thing, etc, feel free to get in touch. I’m always happy to talk about art and sport and love making pictures.
Thank You
I’ve mentioned my recurring rib injury before. It bothered me a lot last year. This was my first year since childhood of surfing daily again. I never had this issue as a kid. I think it had a lot to do with my body aging badly due to being very inactive for many years.
Now it’s fine. I take some quite heavy wipeouts both surfing and kitesurfing and it feels fine so far (of course there are other things that hurt but hopefully I’ll figure out how to deal with these things over time). I noticed while talking to quite a few friends that quite a few of them are suffering from the same thing – both surfers and kitesurfers. Ages range from 20’s to 40’s. When I talked to a GP a while ago he said there was not much that could be done and that it would recover naturally. I think that this is pretty much true but I do believe there are some things that can be done. I’ve tried them and they worked for me.
I think that it’s irrelevant whether it is broken or not as it cannot really be be immobilised anyway. But the pain can be quite severe and will likely do this job for you if you’re not stupid enough to take pain killers.
Anyway, this is the cure that worked for me:
1. Rest
2. Chill out and have fun doing something that is not painful. Maybe bowling or darts or ping pong or drinking tea could be good. This will help you forget about it which is absolutely crucial.
after the pain has subsided a bit…
3. Stretch. Long stretches up towards the sky are good. Torso rotations are also excellent. General yoga is great. (I’ll post more about stretches soon)
4. Swim. Swimming fixes everything. All strokes are good but freestyle is particularly good. Try doing long slow strokes, stretching forwards as much as possible and gliding a lot. Bodysurfing is also excellent. I’ve written more about swimming before here.
I’ll post some more of my thoughts on prevention soon.
If you have a rib injury, I hope this helps you get back out there soon.
Thank you
 
Today I had a really nice long chilled kiting session with a friend. It was flat water for a change. Usually I’m too lazy to venture into flat water as the beach is closer to where I live most of the time. When I got there I was so lazy I didn’t even feel like going out. But the conditions with the tide and wind were close to perfect – nice and gusty, on and off with quite a fair bit of chop. Unfortunately there was no current and only one or two poles and hidden hazards. Last time I kited there I hit a submerged bridge at low speed as the wind was dying and I was negotiating a route in near a messed up fence with lots of trash around it. Today I managed to avoid this dark corner and it looked cleaner. Or maybe that’s because I was looking more at the sky and the horizon.
My main goal for the session was to relax. But I also experimented with going as slow and as fast as possible. Slow is definitely harder. I usually use a green kite but my kite buddy had a blue one in the same style that was partially rigged already. He wasn’t using it so I just went with that. I try not to look much at the kite or even think about it but the blue against the sky has a very different feel. And it’s definitely the fastest I’ve ever been so it has to be the colour. I only really need one kite so I’m thinking of getting a few different colours in the same style. Or maybe I’ll just paint mine when if I get sick of it.
Here’s a very interesting history of Flexifoil. There are some great classic old pics and crazy experiments and stories. It’s quite amazing how humble fun things like this evolved into massive sports like paragliding and kitesurfing.
