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Downwind SUP Foiling mania is sweeping the world...this exciting discipline has captured the imagination of many including our co-founder, Will. In part 3 will gets a new board, has a few more runs and gets the SMACKDOWN reminding himself of how challenging ( yet rewarding ) this journey can be. We reflect on comments from the community after parts 1 and 2, share lessons learnt and pass on some hints and tips!
A lot of you have said theres very little real world information about how to get into it so we decided to capture our our journey and share it with you. Â You can find the rest of the series below including part 4 (exclusive to PRO) where Will takes you on a winging session and talks you through how he develops foundation foil riding skills that will help him on his next downwind run!
Hi Guys! Only just seen this, not sure why the YT algorithm didn’t ping it my way ASAP? Anyway, really good discussion, especially when talking about your progression and breaking it down into parts. That all sounded very familiar! It’s what makes DW so challenging. You go through a tremendous amount of time and effort tuning kit and technique so that you can finally paddle up, and once you’re up, you’re thinking ‘I’VE MADE IT!!! I CAN DW! Err, hang on! Now whatt!?!’ There’s a whole raft of technique, skill and experience you need to learn, and doing that when… Read more »
Thanks for your comment Christian, hopefully you will enjoy the next part where we really focus on pumping technique with some coaching from some riders with more expertise. Hopefully will get a session with you soon when that knee has recovered!
Will
Sounds great. One thing I’d bear in mind is different pumping styles for different situations. The technique I described above is not a traditional flat water pumping style, but works well in short, slow moving, messy, light wind (hence the need for a lot of pumping!) chop, where gaining speed isn’t necessarily the aim as resetting your height on the mast and being in tune with the energy that is available. Trying to gain speed in those small messy conditions wasn’t efficient or very effective (for me at least) because I ended up trying to go faster than the bumps,… Read more »
Thanks for the comment Christian – reply good to hear your insight on pumping. Its motivating as seems like there is still LOADS to learn and develop through the journey! Will
Oh, and just to say the smackdown is an ever present risk until you get really good. It was on one particular smackdown run that I got off the water and pretty much immediately contacted Swift to start drawing me up a new board!
Christian
Thats why we love it so much – its going to be a long time until its not challenging…perfect!