Water

Foiling is still a young sport, and tends to reinvent itself every year. New disciplines, new gear, new techniques - everyone's always learning. This creates a precious thing: a community where nine-year-olds and seventy-year-olds, pro surfers and total novices, are all figuring it out together. I love the social fabric this creates - and as much as I love the flow state of flight, the true reward is the friends I've made along the way. Yes, I know that's lame. It's true and I'm sticking to it.

This also means I learned as an adult. I remember all the hopelessness, the exhaustion, the screamed curses that I thought were just for me but turns out the wind carries those pretty well, the flesh wounds and broken bones, the annual cycle of "this is impossible" becoming "I can do this! (sometimes)". Foiling takes grit: a willingness to look stupid, get tired, and keep showing up. But we all remember those days - so there's always a pep talk on the beach, or someone flying by making it look easy, yelling that you've got it.

Remote work in AI let me do something I thought was a retirement dream: live in my favorite foil spots in the world and train every day. I split my time between the Gorge, the Bay, and Puerto Rico - foil meccas where friends from all over converge. I'm grateful every day that I don't have to choose between work I love and the water.

A broken ankle grounded me from big air kiteboarding, but the foiling world conveniently invents a new sport roughly once a year, so wing foiling appeared right on schedule. I got obsessed, then competitive, and eventually won the North American Wing Foil Championship in 2024 and qualified for Team USA. I still race, but the newer disciplines have pulled me more toward waves. On a hydrofoil, you can find waves everywhere.

Foils unlock waves in a way nothing else does. They're technical and absurdly efficient. You learn to engage with any pocket of energy: a puff of wind, a malformed chunk of chop, the smallest swell. You can feel and surf with all of it.

Constantly learning new things on the water helps me in my technical work. I'm comfortable with the discomfort of not knowing something yet, with the process of honing a new skill until it clicks. At work, a tough day is a stressful launch, some frantic Zooms, and "oh my god why did you delete that database." On a double overhead wave, it's getting slammed into a reef twenty feet deep and finding my happy place so I don't panic and drown. Work stress feels manageable after that. Engineering and foiling are equally consuming for me, so it's also fun to make them collide with little side projects like this tool I built to compare upwind performance across gear and conditions.

I've tackled 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 (looking at you, Tow Boogie), and now parawing. We apparently have to invent a more obscure sport every year. You're welcome to call it all windsurfing. I won't correct you.