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Jen Miller might not be the best—or youngest— surfer out there, but she’s certainly one of the most grateful.

Remember joyful childhood days spent flying around on bikes, roller skates, or surfboards, and pounding the pavement during hours of double Dutch, basketball, or tennis? This summer, get inspired to get up, get out, and have fun with our series Move Your Body, in which women share stories of channeling their inner child by diving into an activity they loved or yearned to learn as a kid.

Most people learn to surf when they're young and bendy. I did not. I waited until the summer of 2020, two months before my 40th birthday, to give the sport a try, when my body was far less able to bounce back on the many occasions when a wave pushed my torso in one direction and pulled a surfboard, attached to my leg via a tether, in another.

Because in that summer of all summers, convenience and distress converged and lead me to an eight-foot foam plank in an electric blue exactly the same shade as my favorite childhood bathing suit. Who cared if I left a little of my dignity in the water every time I paddled out and set myself in the way of a wave? It’s not like I had anywhere else to go or anything else to do. Might as well do battle with the ocean before the pandemic swallowed me whole.

I’d dreamed of surfing for as long as I could swim. As a kid, I spent my summers in a campground five miles inland from Avalon, New Jersey, the same way my mother had spent hers a generation before me. I swam at a guarded beach between lifeguards, often carrying a boogie board to ride waves on my stomach, while the surfers one block north stood and flew free. I desperately wanted to join them, but mom couldn’t haul me down to the beach early for lessons without also hauling down three other kids. Then my parents split and sold the camper, and I took up long-distance running instead.

When I came back to the shore as an adult, I watched a few group lessons from my beach chair, but all the kids I saw taking them were— kids. My body had already accumulated the bulbs of aches and pains that would sprout to “nagging” as I slid through my 30s. I also traveled beyond the beach in the summer, taking long road trips to see this big, wide country with my dog and running shoes in tow. For a while, it felt more adventurous, even brave, than going to the same beach and eating in the same restaurants and getting ice cream cones from the same shops as I’d been doing most of the summers of my life.

Covid put a pause on all that adventure. As the pandemic shut me up in my house in a Philadelphia suburb, my dad realized a dream of his own and bought a house in Avalon, blocks rather than miles from the beach. So when he asked me how I wanted to replace the blowout 40th-birthday party I’d planned and then canceled, “a surfboard” popped out. I took a lesson where I was twice the age of the instructor and four times that of anyone else in the class. I never got close to getting on top of the board and on a wave at the same time, though my fellow students caught one on their second or third try. The afternoon after that first surf lesson, I napped for two hours, then went to bed at 9 p.m., only to wake before sunrise to screaming muscles that had never complained, even after running multiple 50K trail races.

But I was hooked, even if I looked like a Bernese mountain dog in a lineup of whippets. When I should have been working, I watched surf videos, read articles about skill and technique, researched surf camps in San Diego, Costa Rica, Australia when it would open back up. In the fall and winter, I watched more experienced surfers in full wet suits, hoods, boots, and gloves tackling the winter waves with a longing that I had both the gear and skills to do the same.

I also read about others who turned to surfing later in life, like snowboarder Lindsey Jacobellis, who told Complex that “it kind of puts your body in a different state.” But even then, “later in life” in surfing terms was 19 years old, and she was coming from a balance sport (and a professional at it, no less). As a (non-professional) ultrarunner, my body can endure physical work and occasional pain, but being able to keep moving forward for very long periods of time was a whole different skill than navigating motion in three planes, or the balance required to ride even the most modest of Jersey shore waves. I felt like I was learning to drive a stick-shift car all over again, with a slightly lower risk of dying.

For two summers, I kept hammering away. I got better at paddling, and judging and lining up with waves at their inflection points. I did not get better at popping up onto the board, but the near misses of standing up just as the water curled down were addictive with possibility.

Even on bad surf days, when the water was froth or glass, I’d still paddle out, hang off the board with the water hugging my torso and legs, and let myself drift. I’d stay that way until I got too close to the same guarded beach I’d swum at when I was a kid, then paddle back out to the surfer’s section of the ocean that was, on those chopped or flat days, just for me—until I got too close again and went back to the start.

At the very end of last summer, my second surfing summer, when the lifeguard stands emptied out as classrooms tentatively filled, I took the board out one last time. I saw a candidate wave, turned myself and my board, and paddled. I caught the wave’s tip and leaped up on the board at just the right time. But my balance faltered, and instead of gliding with the wave, I came skidding on the shore, the force yanking my hair from its braid and filling my rash guard with sand. I landed in front of an older man with a perfect tan holding a surfboard, looking like he’d been doing this all his life, which he probably had.

“You’re crash-wave-bang,” he said.

“I’m what?” I yelled through a curtain of hair.

“You’re crash-wave-bang,” he tried again.

At first, I thought he said afraid. Or maybe it was brave. He said both, I’ve decided.

This third surfing summer, I have charged again into glorious, salty battle. I spent the winter doing push-ups and shoulder presses to help my body pop up easier. On my first time out, on Memorial Day weekend, on a choppy sea that brought out a dozen surfers to my small surf beach, I strode into the water with my head held high, even if I was the only woman out, even when water knocked me back down, over and over and over again. I was, at least, in the fight.

Right before I turned back to shore, I saw a young girl coming out, probably the same age I was when I first longed to be in the water. She looked surprised to see me.

"Hello!" she said, one hand guiding her pink board and the other waving at me.

"Hello!" I called, then got hit in the back of the head by a wave, which pulled my board to the shore, my body attached to it and lurching after. I continued back in, and she surfed on, gliding the waves with ease.

Maybe I'll get to her level one day. Even if I don't, I want to still be in the water, shouting back hello.

Jen A. Miller is the author of Running: A Love Story.

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