From Sports Illustrated:
Dale Webster’s Endless Summer
by Chris Ballard
“What does it mean to give your life to your sport? Ask Dale Webster. Every day for the last 32 years, every single day, he has surfed. He heads out each morning in Bodega Bay, a blustery town on the northern California coast, and paddles into the 50° water, a worn-out 59-year-old in a worn-out wet suit. He’s caught waves during howling storms, while wracked by kidney stones and, once, within snapping distance of a Volvo-sized great white (“never paddled so hard in my life,” he says)...
...Why do all this? It began “as an incredible excuse to get stoked,” as Webster puts it. A storm stirred up prodigious waves on Sept. 3, 1975, and Webster began surfing daily. In 1976, a leap year, it occurred to him: Why not keep going until Feb. 29 of another leap year, 2004? In a world in which diets are successful if they last six months, it was a preposterously ambitious goal. “People thought I was crazy,” says Webster, and they were probably right.”
Crazy or not, Dale stuck to his dream with the dedication, attitude and motivation necessary to accomplish his goal. And yet, as this article poignantly tells it, there is always sacrifice involved in the pursuit of an objective. And sometimes the price of Dale’s kind of single mindedness is too steep.
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