Exercise
One trick I’ve noticed hard charging Brits Tom Lowe and Tom Butler do before their mind bending winter sessions is to warm up their muscles before they hit the water to reduce the chance of injury. Tom Butler does some light jogging and skipping just to ‘get the blood moving’ while Tom Lowe who has injured his shoulder many times in the line of duty uses resistance bands to exercise his muscles and ready them for his epic paddles.
Swimming is my choice of training for winter as I see it is my primary form of escape from any tricky situations and I practice swimming with longer intervals between breaths and underwater to boost confidence in wipe-outs. Ultimately though the best training is to keep surfing so you concentrate on making waves not training for wiping out, as practicing success not failure is a more positive and healthy mind-set to take to winter waves. In addition studies have shown that repeated exposures to cold water ‘induces changes in regulation of thermal homeostasis’ – in other words the more you surf in cold water the easier it becomes! This is the training effect, just as you may train to run faster and longer you can train your body to be better adapted to cold water by increasing your exposure to it. If there are no waves to surf, get in the sea for a swim! If you need any more convincing on the benefits of increasing your winter water exposure, in the crazy world of the self obsessed, people now pay for ‘cold water’ beauty treatments – we get to do it for free!
Weather
The success of your winter missions so often depends on timing those optimum weather windows. Magicseaweed I use for swell/tides and windguru for noting those all important wind directions and any shifts during the day. Of equal importance is keeping an eye on the actual weather, will it be snowing or icy roads on your way to and from the beach? – that can be quite a factor on the highlands in Ireland and Scotland. Is the visibility due to close in during your session? – something to bear in mind when you are planning an outer reef mission. Accuweather I find very good for predicting those hourly changes correctly and you can look on xcweather.co.uk for live wind readings around the UK and Ireland to track any wind shifts or frontal movements as they happen. Sites like weatheronline.co.uk have radar and satellite imagery so you can monitor cloud cover or rain if you are looking for that golden hour of sun to shoot photos in. For long range predictions on what the week holds in store I like the 9 day synoptic charts on wetterzentrale.de/pics/avnpanel1.html that update every 6 hours and let you see how to plan your work and play schedule.
