4/3 wetsuit

Today rivals one of the coldest, wettest periods of sporting that I've ever experienced.

In high school my sophomore year, my friends and I got the bright idea to go surfing in January. The waves we not good but we felt like getting out and being bad asses. Needless to say, 1 hour after getting in we were shivering on the boardwalk, unsuccessful in our quest to get any kind of good wave catching in. The lobster gloves and booties designed to keep out extremities warm failed after about 15 minutes, or just as the water was beginning to soak through the lyrca. The wetsuits we had were 3/2, meaning 3cm on the chest, and 2cm thickness on the arms and legs. In January, you definitely would've needed a 4/3. The painful part of the whole experience was when you had to duck dive under the waves while paddling out so as to avoid getting reamed by the white wash from the previous wave. This involves dipping your board under water and following through as if you were swam diving under the wave. The frequent duck diving in January is usually followed by the famed "ice cream headache." This is where you eat ice cream too fast you and get a weird pain in the frontal lobe region of your brain. The pain subsides after a few minutes, but the initial shock really isn't pleasant. If you are lucky/smart you do in fact have gloves and perhaps a hood even; this happens to make surfing in the winter all the more enjoyable.

Riding bikes for 3 hrs in the rain while its 45 degrees is roughly the same kind of pain, only you can't just turn around when you're halfway through. The option of stopping at a gas station is also impossible when you decided to leave your apartment at 4:30 and it gets dark at 7:30. Throw in soaking wet gloves and inability to wear them longer than the first 45 minutes of the ride makes things a bit more interesting. Shifting when you can't feel your hands or feet and standing up to pedal for longer than 15 minutes at a time due to the inability to shift into an easier gear hurts the legs a bit more than normal.

Needless to say, the whole experience was probably as epic as they get and it brought me back to the good 'ol days of high school wave riding tomfoolery and ice cream headaches.

Thanks for reading,

-E