Dawn Patrol

52

Sunny spreads the mat out on the polished floor of her little house in Pacific Beach and lies down.

The old bungalow is just a half block from the beach. It was her grandparents' house; they bought it back in the twenties, when average people could afford something like that. Her grandfather died a long time ago; her grandmother passed just a few years back, after a long, sad struggle with Alzheimer's.

Eleanor Day had been quite a woman. Sunny holds on to the memories of long walks on the beach with her, and building sand castles, and how her grandmother bought Sunny her first surfboard and called her “Gidget,” like the TV show. Sunny loved to stay with Grandma at the beach. It was her favorite place in the world.

Sunny visited her a lot in the home. Some days, Eleanor would know who Sunny was; other days, she'd get her confused with her daughter, or her sister, or an old friend from college. It made Sunny sad, but it didn't stop her from visiting.

She knew who Eleanor was.

Sunny was living in a small apartment when she got the word that her grandmother was gone. The Dawn Patrol came to the funeral, and no one was more surprised than Sunny when the lawyer told her that she had inherited the old two-bedroom bungalow near the beach.

Her grandmother had wanted Sunny to have it because she knew that she would appreciate it.

She does, of course.

It holds a lot of memories, a lot of love.

Now she takes a few deep breaths, then launches into the rigorous Pilates exercises that make up her daily routine. She goes at it hard for an hour-stretching, twisting, moving into heavy aerobic drills, then stretching it down.

Then she moves over to the old surfboard that she stretched across two cinder blocks. She lies down on the board, jumps to her knees, then instantly up to her feet; then she lies back down again. She does this a hundred times, until the movement is as smooth, powerful, and automatic as it can be. Her heart pounding, a fine sheen of sweat coating her skin, she moves to the free weights and lifts, first working her upper body and arms. She wants the arm and shoulder strength for paddling and for that sudden burst of speed and energy needed to get into a big wave. Then she works the trapezium and neck muscles, which will help keep her neck from getting snapped in the worst-case scenario of going over the falls headfirst.

After that, she straps weights to her ankles and does leg lifts, then picks up a bar and does toe lifts and deep squats, strengthening her quads, calves, and thighs, which will help keep her on the board in the big waves. While her long legs are an advantage in swimming, they work against her in staying on the board, so she has to make sure that they're like steel.

Sunny is a finely honed athlete, five-eleven, big-boned, with a swimmer's broad shoulders, negligible body fat, and those long legs.

“You're a gazelle,” Dave the Love God once said to her as he watched her walk in from the water.

“She's not the gazelle,” Boone said correcting him. “She's the lioness.”

Sunny's always loved Boone for saying that. Well, for a lot of things, but his saying that was enough to love him.

And she keeps her body in superb shape with running, swimming, lifting, stretching. Truth be told, it's not the ideal surfer's body. Most of the best woman surfers have smaller, more compact frames-easier for balance and for the lightning-quick turns and shifts that win competitions.

But Sunny plans to turn her size to her advantage.

A big body, she thinks, for the big waves.

So far, big-wave riding has been pretty much a male preserve. There are a few women starting to ride them, but still plenty of room for a female surfer to stand out in a male lineup. She knows she has the size, weight, and strength to handle the thunder crushers.

Up to now, she's been caught in a vicious circle: You need money to travel to the big waves in Hawaii and Tahiti, but without sponsorship, she doesn't have the money, but she can't get a sponsorship until she rides the big waves, but in order to ride the big waves, she has to travel…

But now the big waves are coming to her. Almost literally to her back door, and all she has to do is walk outside, paddle out, and catch one of the big mackers. The beaches and bluffs will be lined with photographers and video guys, and all she needs is one ride, one monster ride, with her tawny hair waving like her personal flag against the black wave, and she knows that her picture will be on the front cover of the mags.

And the sponsorship will follow.

So lift, she tells herself. Push past the pain; it's only pain. Every fiber-ripping lift will help you stay up in that wave. This is what you've been training for for months, for years, all your life. So do one more, one more, one more…

The lifting done, she goes back on the mat and stretches some more, then lies back, breathes, and imagines herself riding the big wave.

It's not mere fantasizing; she carefully breaks it down, moment by moment, from the paddle in to the drop to the heavy right break, into the tube, then out again with the blast of spray. She imagines it again and again, each time in more detail, and in each repetition she does it stronger and better. She never imagines missing the wave, or wiping out, or getting sucked over the falls.

Sunny keeps it rigorously positive.

The sound of her moment coming to her.

She gets up, wipes herself down with a towel, and sits and listens to the ocean.