Surfing through the life-course: silver surfers’ negotiation of ageing

Abstract

ABSTRACTImages of surfing have tended to reflect consumer culture’s fascination with youthfulness, simultaneously perpetuating a myth that participants are reckless, male risk-seeking hedonists. This image, however, is being challenged with increasing numbers of older male and female surfers taking to the water. Drawing on empirical research conducted in the UK, I explore the meanings that recreational surfing plays in participants’ lives and identities as they grow older. The research involved interviews with male and female British recreational surfers from ‘middle-age’ through to what the media have dubbed ‘silver surfers’. I examine both life-long surfers and those who have taken to surfing in mid-life. While ageing is often conceptualized as a phase of cognitive and physical decline, recreational surfing is being used as an identity resource in the extension of ‘mid-life’ and in the process of negotiating anxieties about ageing [Tulle 2008. Ageing, the Body and Social Change: Running in Later Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan]. The paper highlights ways in which older surfers reproduce, and challenge dominant discourses about ageing, physical activity and embodiment, and how they envisage their sporting futures, negotiating ageing though surfing. Lastly, it draws out some of the implications for active ageing policy agendas.