Living in Madrid and Being a Surfer: How to Make the Most of Your Time Away from the Ocean

Living in Madrid and surfing has a fairly obvious contradiction: you can think about the sea every day and have it hundreds of kilometers away.

Carving was born precisely around that problem. For years we looked for ways to make the most of the time between trips to reach the next surf session with more resources, better preparation, and a clearer idea of what we wanted to work on.

Surfskating, training, swimming, videos, and trips were some of the answers we found.

The problem is not living far from the sea

Living in Madrid limits the number of days you can surf, but it doesn't mean that all the time between surf sessions has to be wasted time.

In fact, it forces you to organize yourself differently.

If you know you won't be in the water every day, it becomes more important to arrive with your body prepared, choose your trips well, and make the most of each session to learn something you can keep until the next one.

Preparing your body also helps

Surfing requires paddling, mobility, endurance, strength, and the ability to continuously react to changing positions.

You don't need to exactly reproduce surfing in a gym. But staying active between trips can prevent the first surf session after several weeks away from the sea from becoming solely about trying to survive exhaustion.

Swimming, working on mobility, strength training, or simply maintaining good general physical condition can help you make the most of the days you finally spend in the water.

Surfskating allowed us to repeat what the sea doesn't let us repeat

A wave lasts a few seconds. If you try a move and it doesn't work out, you might have to wait a long time until you find another similar opportunity.

With surfskating, we started working in a different way: isolating a movement, repeating it, making a correction, and trying again.

It doesn't replace surfing and we never intended for it to. But for those of us who lived far from the sea, it became an especially useful tool for continuing to think and move around surfing.

Today we still use it in our Surfskate classes in El Palmar and within other programs when it makes sense.

Learning to choose equipment also prevents losing surf sessions

When you have few surf days, using a board that doesn't match your level can be quite frustrating.

Smaller, narrower, or with less volume doesn't automatically mean better.

A board that allows you to paddle, catch enough waves, and continue to gain autonomy usually helps you much more than one that on paper seems more advanced but drastically reduces the number of opportunities you have.

If you are at that point, you can read our guide on when to switch from a foam board to a fiberglass board.

But nothing replaces time in the water

All training out of the water has a limit.

There are things you can only learn by surfing: reading a set, positioning yourself at the peak, choosing a wave, reacting to a section, understanding a current, or making decisions while everything changes in front of you.

That's why trips eventually became another essential part of Carving.

Everything we worked on in Madrid had to eventually meet the water.

From trips from Madrid to a base in El Palmar

For years we organized our weeks around the next trip to the coast.

Over time we started spending more and more days in the sea until Carving eventually moved its base to El Palmar.

This change allowed us to connect the different parts of the process much faster: surfing, observing a session, analyzing it, working on something out of the water, and going back in.

If you want to know about this transition, you can read why Carving moved from Madrid to El Palmar.

Madrid is still very present

Having moved our main activity to Cádiz does not erase all that came before.

Madrid was where we learned to find solutions when we couldn't surf every day and where we met many of the people who continue to come to Carving.

And for a surfer living far from the sea, the logic remains quite similar:

stay active, make good use of your time out of the water, and when the next trip comes, try to spend as much time surfing as possible.

If you want to dedicate several consecutive days to the sea, you can consult our Surfcamps in El Palmar.