Surf Culture and Cold Turkey: Quitting Smoking for the Waves

I’m Viv Carr. I’m 33, I live in San Diego, and I quit smoking two years ago after a ten-year habit. I didn’t quit because of a health scare. I didn’t quit because of a relationship. I quit because I wanted to surf better than I was surfing, and I couldn’t do both.

I want to tell you how that happened, because I think sometimes people assume you need a dramatic moment to quit. I didn’t have one. What I had was a pull that got strong enough to outweigh the pull in the other direction.

Ten Years of Cigarettes

I started smoking at 23. I was working in restaurants in the Hillcrest neighborhood of San Diego, and restaurant culture is still pretty smoke-friendly in the way that it allows you to go outside every hour without anyone raising an eyebrow. I wasn’t a heavy smoker by some standards: half a pack to a pack a day, depending on the shift. But I was consistent, and I was dependent, and by the time I understood that, it had been years.

I wasn’t unhappy about my life in most ways. San Diego is a good place to live. I had friends, a decent job, a decent apartment. Smoking was just part of the texture of things. The cigarette outside after service, the one with coffee in the morning, the one walking to the beach.

The beach is the thing. I’ve lived near the ocean my whole life, but I didn’t actually get into the water until I was 30.

Learning to Surf at 30

A friend of mine, Keely, had been surfing since high school. She kept asking me to try it. I kept saying I was too old to start, which at 30 sounds embarrassing now. Finally one Saturday morning she handed me a foam longboard and drove me to Tourmaline Surfing Park, which is one of the gentler breaks in San Diego, popular with beginners and older surfers.

I stood up twice in two hours. Both times I fell almost immediately. I was hooked.

There’s something about surfing that gets into you fast if it’s going to get into you at all. It’s not like going to the gym, where the motivation has to come from somewhere external. The ocean gives you immediate feedback, immediate consequence, and when you get it right for even five seconds there is no feeling quite like it. I started going twice a week. Then three times. Then every day I could manage it.

And then I started to hit a wall.

Getting Gassed

About six months into surfing, I was trying to paddle out at La Jolla Shores on a day with some real chop. If you’ve paddled through breaking waves you know the drill: you have to time your sets, duck-dive under the whitewater, keep driving out past the break. It takes more upper-body endurance than it looks.

I kept having to stop. I was gasping. The other people around me, people twice my age, were paddling through the sets without stopping. I’d get knocked back by a wave, get back on the board, start paddling again, and within a minute I needed to rest.

I knew exactly why. I’d been smoking for seven years at that point, and my lungs were not what they should have been for someone my age. I wasn’t sick. I just didn’t have what I needed.

I paddled back to shore that day and sat on the beach and thought about it for a while. I smoked a cigarette, which seems like the wrong ending to that story, but that’s what I did. And I thought: this is going to keep being a ceiling if I don’t do something about it.

The Community

The surf community in San Diego is a specific thing. It’s not a formal community, nobody has a membership card, but there are regulars at every break and you get to know each other. Tourmaline has a lot of older surfers, which I love. There are people in their 60s and 70s out there who have been surfing that spot for forty years.

Almost nobody smokes. I don’t mean this as a judgment or a purity thing. It’s just a fact about surf culture: your lungs are your engine. You can’t maintain a serious commitment to surfing and also be whittling down your capacity session by session. It’s like trying to run marathons on bad knees — you can do it for a while, but the activity itself will eventually demand a decision.

I never felt directly judged for smoking. But I did feel like an outsider when I’d head to the parking lot after a session and light up. Not because anyone said anything, but because it put me in a separate category from something I wanted to fully belong to.

Quitting Cold Turkey

I set a quit date in March, two years ago. March 1st. I picked cold turkey for a straightforward reason: I didn’t want to extend the process. I’d used nicotine gum briefly a few years earlier and it kept me dependent on nicotine while just shifting the delivery method. I wanted to get through the acute phase and be done with it.

The first three days were the hardest days of the whole quit. I’m not going to minimize that. I was irritable in a way that surprised me, given that I wasn’t a heavy smoker. Nicotine withdrawal doesn’t calibrate itself politely based on how much you smoked. Your body wants what it’s been getting, and when it stops getting it, it complains loudly.

I surfed through it. I mean that literally. Every time a craving hit hard, I went to the water. Not always to surf — sometimes just to sit on the beach or swim. The ocean has a way of resetting your nervous system that I can’t explain scientifically but that I’ve come to rely on completely. The cold water, the noise, the movement. Cravings run on a timeline, and if you can get through the four or five minutes of intensity, they pass. The ocean gave me somewhere to be during those minutes.

By day four I was through the worst of it. By day ten I could feel the difference in my chest when I paddled hard.

The Hardest Moment

A month in, I got worked.

Surfers call it getting worked when the ocean beats you: caught inside by a big set, held down by multiple waves, pushed around and disoriented. It happened to me on a bigger-than-usual day at Ocean Beach. I duck-dived the first wave, but the second one caught me off the board, held me down long enough for me to start wondering which way was up, then pushed me through the foam and deposited me on the inside.

I’ve never been so close to quitting a surf session. I paddled back to the beach, sat down, and my brain immediately went to cigarettes. Not in a logical way. In a pure reflex way. The message was: that was bad, time for a cigarette.

There were no cigarettes. I sat on the beach for twenty minutes and breathed and watched the water. A couple of the regulars came over and asked if I was okay. I said yes. One of them, Eddie, who is 62 and has been surfing Tourmaline since the late ’80s, sat down next to me and didn’t say anything for a while, which was exactly right.

Then he said, “Bad sets happen. You paddle back out.”

I didn’t go back out that day. But I went back the next morning, and I’ve gone back almost every morning since.

Two Years Later

I can paddle out through sets now that would have gassed me completely two years ago. My lung capacity has changed in ways I feel every session. Last fall I started surfing slightly bigger waves at Sunset Cliffs on solid south swells, which is something I wouldn’t have attempted before.

I don’t have a number to give you for this. I can’t tell you my lung capacity improved by X percent. What I can tell you is that I paddled out in a solid overhead swell last October and I wasn’t gasping, and when I got to the lineup and sat up on my board and looked back at the city, I thought about how I would have been on the shore three years ago lighting a cigarette and watching other people do this.

I’m 33. I’ve got a lot of surf years ahead of me if I take care of what I have. Quitting was the most practical thing I’ve ever done for my surfing, and my surfing was the most effective motivation I’ve ever found for quitting. They fed each other.

What I’d Tell You

If you’re still smoking, find your ocean. Find the thing that demands your lungs, demands your presence, demands that you choose. For me it was waves. For you it might be hiking or cycling or chasing your kids around a backyard. It doesn’t have to be surfing, and it doesn’t have to be in San Diego.

What it has to be is something you want badly enough. Because quitting cold turkey is not comfortable, and willpower alone is a thin rope to hang on to. You need something pulling you toward the other side at least as hard as the craving is pulling you back.

Two years without a cigarette. I’m not white-knuckling it anymore. I’m just surfing.

You are not alone in this. There are people ahead of you on this same path who felt the same thing you feel right now, and they made it through, and most of them will tell you the same thing: find your reason and hold onto it. The rest follows.