Chasing flow on a foil.

Foiling is still young enough that everyone is learning at once: nine-year-olds and seventy-year-olds, pro surfers and total novices, all figuring it out together.

As much as I love the flow state of flight, the true reward is the friends I have made along the way. Yes, I know that is cheesy. It is true and I am sticking to it.

I learned as an adult, which means I remember the hopelessness, the exhaustion, the curses the wind carried farther than intended, and the annual cycle where "this is impossible" becomes "I can do this, sometimes."

Foiling takes grit: a willingness to look stupid, get tired, collect a few flesh wounds, and keep showing up. Eventually your body learns something your brain could not explain.

Remote work in AI let me do something I once filed under retirement fantasy: live in my favorite foil spots and train often. I split time between the Gorge, the Bay, and Puerto Rico, following wind, swell, and friends from all over.

I am grateful every day that I do not have to choose between work I love and the water.

A broken ankle grounded me from big air kiteboarding, then wing foiling appeared right on schedule. I got obsessed, got competitive, won the North American Wing Foil Championship in 2024, and qualified for Team USA.

I still race, but the newer disciplines keep pulling me toward waves. On a hydrofoil, you can find surf almost anywhere.

Foils change how you can engage with the power of nature. You learn to hunt and flow with any pocket of energy: a puff of wind, a malformed chunk of chop, the smallest swell.

The obsession is not only waves. It is the moment when judgment, timing, and water line up, and you can feel and surf with all of it.

Foiling helps me practice being in the "not knowing yet": fear, failure, exhaustion, and the ups and downs of constantly pushing my edge.

That carries back to technical work, where progress also comes from testing, adjusting, and staying with hard problems long enough for the next click.

Engineering and foiling are equally consuming for me, so it is fun to make them collide in side projects like Foil Lab, a tool I built to compare upwind performance across gear and conditions.

I have tackled just about every foil discipline at this point: kite, wing, downwind SUP, Foil Drive, tow foiling behind a jet ski, behind a miniature remote-controlled semi-autonomous jet ski, and now parawing.

We apparently have to invent a more obscure sport every year. You are welcome to call it all windsurfing. I will not correct you.