Kitesur fing.... Why?

	Trust me, I’ve been there
By Zoe Williams

MY first brush with extreme sports was when I went to Watergate Bay in Cornwall to kitesurf. This was before Jamie Oliver moved in, before anyone had realised that posh kids went to Rock, before Newquay was anything but Ramsgate with choppier waters. But naturally there were surfers who, being the way they are, were fully engaged in trying to make their “sport” more dangerous than it already was.

I use those quote marks not to be scathing, but because it seems to me that injuring yourself, while a side effect of many sports, shouldn’t be the whole point. And yet, why else was surfing invented? If you just wanted to get wet, you could be a swimmer. If you wanted to get wet while standing up, you could sail. Surely the only appeal of surfing is that you introduce rogue elements like falling off, getting caught underneath a wave and getting bitten by a shark.

All that, however, was not enough for the Cornish water monkeys, hence the kites. The instructor was a man with a very narrow face, the UK’s reigning male kitesurfer of the day. Just down the bay dwelt the lady champion, who also had a preternaturally narrow face, so that I decided this must just be the wages of championship – they were so committed and so full-time that the wind was slowly eroding their cheeks.

Anyway, to get back to the lesson. First, you have to learn to fly a kite – this is not an ordinary kite, it is a gigantic great thing that, in fairly moderate Cornish conditions, will lift you clean off the ground, but that’s only if you’ve managed to get it into the air in the first place. To do that, you need to be able to run pretty fast, to know which way the wind is blowing (I have never been able to do this, literally or metaphorically), and to have, if not Olympic, at least county-standard upper-body strength. Now add the surfing. To do this, you need to have quite accomplished sea legs, to have excellent balance, obviously to be able to swim, to understand the point of it and to have some fleeting confidence that you know what to do when everything goes wrong. When you put both these activities together, their difficulty increases logarithmically.

So my question about this, well, about all extreme sports, apart from “why do you want to be injured? Don’t you realise how much easier life is when you’re not injured?” is: seriously, if you’re in the possession of this kind of physical prowess, mate, what are you doing? Get a job as a stuntman, join the circus, entertain the children of celebrities, work in a zoo, be a professional sportsman. Don’t waste it on a holiday.