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Endless Autumn

Surfers Seek the Perfect Wave; We Seek the Perfect Run

by Hal Higdon

Strange how we recall vividly certain events, while others vanish almost as though they had not existed. One event that irrationally remains lodged in my memory is, during a visit to Southern California, having viewed The Endless Summer at the Strand Theatre in Ocean Beach.

The Endless Summer, a 1966 documentary directed and narrated by Bruce Brown, was a half dozen years old when I first saw it, and I suspected it had been playing endlessly at the Strand and would continue to do so as long as waves rolled onto the beach. The film followed two surfers as they embark on a journey to find "the perfect wave," starting in Southern California and moving westward around the world, chasing sun, surf and summer from Hawaii to Tahiti to New Zealand to Australia to South Africa, each stop offering both surfing-ops and photo-ops. Eventually, the pair discovered their perfect wave off a beach at Cape St. Francis, South Africa. Of course, the rationale for their trip and resulting film was not so much finding that wave, but rather the search for it.

"In surfing," says narrator Brown, "the object is to stay in the curl. All goes toward that." The "curl" is that underside of a wave where the surfer teeters between ecstasy and oblivion. On only one occasion did I sample surfing, renting a board during a vacation to the Outer Banks in North Carolina, where the waves, admittedly, loomed much less frighteningly than those at Cape St. Francis. After being slammed into the sand several times, I decided that running served as a safer activity for someone of my abilities.

Nutrition vs. marketing

But in many respects The Endless Summer existed as an allegory for my life as a runner-and maybe yours-our journey to find the perfect run in what we hoped would be an Endless Autumn.

It is true that as runners, we move through different seasons: from spring to summer, from autumn to winter. In the spring of our lives we are children engaged in what Dr. George Sheehan referred to as "play," running from one game to another.

As adults in the greening summers of our lives, we abandon play and focus on completing our educations, breaking free from our parents, obtaining good jobs, enjoying the pleasures money can bring. We settle into relationships and routines that signal the end of summer. But moving into the autumns of our lives, at least some of us revert to childish pursuits and embrace exercise as a means of bringing quality to those lives as well as extending them.

We seek to delay the winter of discontent. In at least its allegorical sense, winter is not fun. It is cold. It is dark. It is a prelude to the grave. If we cannot avoid winter, we would like at least to postpone it, to redirect its harshest winds, to negate its effect on our ability to enjoy life to its fullest. The Strand Theatre has vanished from Ocean Beach, replaced by a souvenir shop. When I tried to rent a copy of The Endless Summer at my local video store, the salesgirl had not heard of it.

In becoming runners, we seek an endless autumn. And like surfers chasing the sun westward around the world, we hope our journey never will end while knowing that some day it will. As long as we find ourselves capable of taking one running step, we exist in an endless autumn. To move is to live. Now is not yet the time to face winter. Light the fires once more! We have many trails to tread, many races yet to run.

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