For most people who ride waves, surfing has a positive impact on them and not the other way around. There aren’t many surfers who can claim to have had a positive impact on surfing itself, and certainly not at the scale that Bianca Valenti could. And now, she’s got her sights set on positively impacting your surfing.

Valenti has gone from being a seven year old who was scared of the skull and crossbones airbrush on her first surfboard to a fearless woman who has successfully tackled both huge waves, surfing’s governing structures, and the sport’s baked-in inequalities.

Surf Simply caught up with Bianca to dig into her achievements, motivations, and systems, and to find out more about how they’ve coalesced into her new focus to help surfers keep surfing and keep improving later into their lives. After all, which surfer wouldn’t want to keep up this pursuit of catching waves for as long as possible?

Bianca, nobody starts surfing in triple overhead waves. Can you share with us your surf biography and how this all began?

I started surfing when I was seven in Dana Point, just standing up on my boogie board. My Mom got me my first hardboard when I was seven. I had a $75 budget and we drove around the three surf shops there were at the time but the only second hand board in any of them was covered in skull and crossbones and I was like, “no way, this is too scary.” The guys at the shop said, “come back tomorrow.” And we came back the next day and they had painted it all white for me. We went down to Doheny Beach and Mom just put her chair at the water's edge and said, “Don't make me come and rescue you!” That was how it all began.

I was longboarding a lot but also shortboarding, and I was entering local contests. At that time they’d have Open Boys and some would have Open Women’s divisions, and because there was no girls division sometimes I’d compete in both, so with the boys in my age group and then in the Open Women’s also, and I just loved it. I’m a competitor, and I love a challenge. Not too long after I started entering, I was usually finishing at the top of the podium.

From the first week I started surfing I got a poster of Kelly Slater and put it on my wall. It said “1992 World Champion”, and he was 21 at the time and I was like, “I want to be that”, you know? And then when I was a teenager, I realized that if you were a girl in surfing, you didn't have the same opportunities as boys.
I had tons of sponsors, but I realized that the girls who had the model type image and the boys on the team would get better deals than me, even though I was always at the top of the podium. That pissed me off and it led me into surfing big waves and activism later on in my life.

I was obsessed with surfing. I played other sports and I subscribed to every single surf magazine and get movies whenever they would come out , and I was always looking for women in the magazines. I was like, “I know they're out there and I know they're surfing well” but they were never in the magazines. The only image you would see was the Reef bikini girl in a thong.

So I gave up on my dream of being the best surfer in the world, like Kelly Slater. I burnt out on competition, too, in my late teens. But then I went to college at UC Santa Barbara, which is right on the water. I joined the surf team and eventually became the captain and I found my love for surfing again.

Was that the start of your journey into riding bigger waves?

Yeah, that was when I started to dabble in bigger waves. North of Santa Barbara, there's some off-radar waves that get pretty big. And I rekindled that love, that feeling of that first day of surfing where I was wondering: “can I do this? I want to do it. I'm really scared but it seems really cool.” And then eventually just going, “Okay I'm gonna go for it.” That opened up this new chapter of my life in surfing and actually gave me a platform for the first time ever to make the change that I wanted to see in the sport.

My first steps into big waves came when I had a near death experience at Ocean Beach in San Francisco in my second year at UCSB. I went up there with a friend on one of the first swells of the season. We were in Santa Cruz, and we got up really early, and everywhere was super crowded. And back in those days Santa Cruz had a pretty heavy locals-only scene. So we were like, let's just keep driving. And we kept driving, kept driving, and we ended up at Ocean Beach and saw these perfect A-frames with offshore winds, sunny, nobody out. But we didn't realize how big it was and there was no scale for us to figure it out. We thought we’d just found gold for the first time!

We caught a rip out perfectly. And as soon as we got out to the third sandbar, [Ocean Beach has three sandbars, not just one!], this wave started to break in front of me, like 10 feet in front of me, that was the size of a house. And I just thought, “Oh my God, I've never seen a wave this big in my life.” It was about to break right in front of me and I was going to have to absorb all of the force. I didn’t know whether to duck dive or bail my board and I decided I was going to try to duck dive it because I had a comp light leash on! Yeah, I was not prepared to be out there. I did not belong out there that day.
The board was immediately ripped out of my hands and I had this violent beating, like brutal spinning, twisting, flipping. Eventually the violence stops, I open my eyes and I just see black. I have no idea which way is up and then luckily my feet touch the sand and I press off the sand and I took probably three strokes to get to the surface. I thought to myself “Wow if there's another wave when I come up, I'm dead. Just fact. I did not even have any emotions around it because it was just the fact. I got to the surface there was not another wave luckily, and I was gasping for air and the blood started pumping back in my fingers and my neck and I had this battery acid feeling all through my legs that I had never felt before.
I saw my friend and he shouted “I'm going in!” and we made it back to the sand and stared out at those perfect waves. I thought, I want to surf those waves, I know I have the skills to do it but now I need to get the right gear and put in the training so that I can surf perfect waves with nobody out.

That was the moment when I decided I was going to surf big waves and I never looked back. Meanwhile, my friend moved to Montana and became a fly fisherman!

And now Ocean Beach is home?

I knew that if I was going to do this then I needed to be up north. My parents split when I was seven and my dad moved to San Francisco. I would always go up there but I didn't really realize that you could surf up there. Then when I was at UCSB I had some friends on the surf team who were from the Bay Area and they told me to bring my gear next time I came to visit my dad and they’d show me around. I wanted to surf bigger waves and I like the culture up here and so I moved up here once I’d graduated university.

Ocean Beach has a reputation as a big, shifting beach break, and presumably it’s a good jumping off point to progress on to even bigger waves at more organised reef breaks?

Ocean Beach is one of the most challenging spots and I always say if you can surf Ocean Beach well then you can surf any wave in the world. The San Francisco Bay is 400 square miles and so all of that water moves in and out of the gate [the narrow strait between San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean, that the famous bridge spans] and wraps around, so at Ocean Beach even on a one or two foot day, which are rare even in the summer, you have all of that 400 square miles of water moving in and out four times a day. It’s like a combination of a wave and a class five river. As far as testing your fitness and your mind set there's no better place. It's cold, it's gnarly, you have to have a really thick skin to learn how to enjoy surfing OB and it's always a ton of work no matter who you are. It does become easier to navigate but it's always hard work and can humble anyone.

Can you talk us through your competitive career. You’re a Pipeline Champion!

I think my last longboard event was in 2006. I got third place in what was the ASP at the time World Championships in Biarritz, and that was the point where I really started just focusing on big waves. I competed in some QS events and I won the Women's Pipeline Pro in 2012, because I still had that dream in the back of my head. I knew I had the skills to do it but whenever I would go to the WQS events and I'd be surfing these small waves on my shortboard I was just thinking that I could have spent the same amount of money and been surfing good barrelling waves. The math just didn't add up because you would have to win the WQS event in order to even walk away with a little bit of money. So I phased out competing and started to focus on surfing big waves.

We had the first ever women's big wave event in Nelscott Reef in Oregon in 2014 and I ended up winning that. I also loved the culture of big wave surfing, though, because I found that it was a culture very much like San Francisco - people who believed that anything was possible and wanted to explore the edge of possibility. I was like, “Yeah, this is my culture and these are my people.”

So the Campaign For Equity In Women's Surfing came out of big wave events?

Exactly. When I was at that event in Oregon I met Paige [Alms], Keala [Kennelly], Andrea [Moller] and we bonded. We saw that there was a lot of power in what we were doing because people's minds were really opening to what women are capable of. The responses to seeing us on the webcast that day were so positive and so supportive. And people were just like, “Wow, we didn't know women could surf big waves like this,” and it really was this moment where I realised there's something here, so we’ve got to stick together.
We wanted to compete in all the other events that the men were competing in and in the process we ended up winning equal pay across the entire WSL by getting the State of California to back us. That's a long story short.

Was the intention as you as you got that ball rolling that this could cover all surfing contests, or were you just focusing on the big wave events when you initially started, for that personal goal?

What began as a push for inclusion in big wave events quickly expanded to a fight for equal pay. And it became clear that for the WSL to grant equal pay in Big Wave events, it would require a mandatory, organization-wide policy change.

We just wanted access at first. We just wanted to have the opportunity to compete in these events, and we started with Mavericks. Then along the way, when we were having these meetings with different stakeholders and especially the people who didn't surf - those were the people who I found most valuable to receive coaching and feedback from - they said: “Hey you know you should really be fighting for equal pay too.”
You know, at first that felt like a scary thing to do, right. It was a risk. Speaking up on anything is always a risk. And then we realised that we should.

We had these crazy meetings with the State of California and the WSL and it came down to the fact that they couldn’t legally close the coastline for a surf competition and exclude women. I remember at one point the WSL said, “Well, if we give you equal pay in the Mavericks event, then we'd have to do it across the entire WSL for longboard, shortboard, everything.” And we were like, “Yeah!” And so we backed them into a corner on that decision.

In September 2018, the WSL announced that they would guarantee women’s heats and equal prize money not only at Mavericks but every WSL event moving forward.

Yesterday I was at physical therapy because I have a knee injury at the moment. The person after me was Caroline Marks, the 2023 World Champion and Olympic gold medal winner. I had never met her and she was very nice. When I was driving away after, I was like, yeah, she gets equal pay because of our work. And so that felt really good to think about, you know?

You were the crew that sent the lift back down.

It took many generations of work. We were just the people who were able to take it across the line. There's still more work to be done on the inclusion side, right - we want equal participation – but you know it's great to see how far we’ve come and the direction it’s headed. That was a huge milestone.

I imagine that Caroline is one of those surfers who's come in around that time and has probably benefited hugely from those changes.

Definitely. And it's just in terms of our income. And that’s important because you do need resources to be able to perform at the highest level. Professional surfing is different these days and that additional income that she has pulled in has probably gone on coaching, a manager, and all the things that are required to be at the top of the sport. That all needs to be paid for. Twenty years ago how many pro surfers had a coach traveling on tour with them? I had to coach myself along the way, ask everyone a ton of questions, try to get my mom to film me whenever I could growing up because nobody wants to sit out and film their friends, do they? I had to definitely learn differently led me to realise that I could help coach other people too.

And you ended up coaching the oldest person to ever surf Mavericks?

That's how the whole surf longevity program came about. A guy recognised my surfboard (all of my boards have a pink starburst airbrush) and came up to me on the beach one day. He knew my friend Paige, and he said he had this crazy idea he wanted to talk to me about. He was really persistent, coming by my family restaurant all the time, and eventually I met up with him to hear him out. He told me how he likes to set a goal for himself every ten years, and how he’d started surfing when he was 53. He'd had a calling and a dream to surf Mavericks before his 60th birthday. He was 59. He wanted to know if I thought it was possible and if I would be willing to coach him.
I thought about it for about a week and then I went back and I interviewed him. I wanted to make sure that his reasons why were authentic. And they were. He had a genuine calling and he wasn't just trying to say like, “Hey, I conquered this mountain.” From that, I knew he was willing to do the work. And so I said, yes.

What was that process then, to get him to that level to surf Mavericks in less than a year?

He was already an athletic guy so I didn't have to do much on the physical training, just slight tweaks to tailor his programing to support surfing with more ease. I had to shift his approach to help him become more efficient in the water and get the right gear that would help him catch the waves, and surf well on them. Over the course of about 10 months I had him take every single safety course there was. We did free diving courses. I told him we had to surf together at least two times a month. So we really dialled in his techniques, his habits, and his mindset. It became all about efficiency and making sure that he could handle a wipeout if he had it.

Tell us about the surf session that this all built up to.

That year there weren't that many swells. Mavericks can break from 15 feet to 100 feet and so when you get a really big swell you get people flying in from all over the world and those days are like the ninth degree black belt days. But then sometimes we get these really nice days that are just big enough for it to break, which is still a 15 20 foot wave, but you're mostly just surfing with a few locals from the area.
There had been a few swells like that so he had gotten to go out and see it from the line-up. I saw a day in springtime that was going be big enough to break for a few hours, from like 10 AM to 2 PM.

Whenever I called him he would always answer his phone, but on the day before I called him and texted him and I was FaceTiming him and he wasn't answering. Finally, he called me back, and he was at a business dinner. I told him to go straight home, and go to sleep. “Tomorrow is your day.”

I wanted to try and let him do his own thing out there so let him go for his first couple of waves without me in his ear, but he missed them. Most people when they surf Mavericks for the first time paddle towards the shoulder because it’s the safe zone, but to catch the wave you really have to square up and take it head on. So I had him come and sit next to me, and I saw a great wave coming and told him to go for it. He spun around, and he started to paddle a little to the right. I shouted to paddle more left. That's all I said. And then I didn't see him because he had caught the wave. That was the first time when I thought that if he dies, his wife and kids are going to kill me! I was watching and watching and then about 45 seconds later, it's a long wave, he kicked out in the channel with his hands up.

It was really inspiring. It took me 20 years to surf Mavericks. I had just coached him in 10 months. I thought, what if I take these strategies and everything that I taught him that took me 20 years to learn, and apply them to myself? That was when I realized I had a system. And like any good coach I took the next year to test it on myself. I had the best year of my career: no injuries, more victories, more stoke. I’ve created this system out of it that's I call the Surf Forever System and it's about your habits, techniques, and mindset.

It sounds like a very systems based approach. Your biography, your career achievements, the gentleman you were talking about, they're very goals-focused. Are you goals-driven, or are you systems-driven? Or are your goals actually just the result of incredible systems from a young age and they seem like goals because they are such great achievements, but actually if you are pitching your systems high enough that's where you get?

My habits always are shifting and evolving. There's different seasons and different habits for each season, and I think that in the past I was very goals driven and I went through burnout and injuries and I would achieve goals but then come crashing down. And so I shifted to being really focused on my love of the sport. One of the things that helps me love it more is training smart. I think that the result of my success now is the systems approach.

And it’s a holistic system, not just physical training?

Yes, it's completely holistic. The system breaks down three core pillars — habits, techniques, and mindsets — and teaches you how to think about each one so you can keep getting better as you age. I show you what works for me and some of my students to give you real examples and ideas, and then you build your own personal blueprint from there.

That's what makes it work for such a wide range of people. In my first Surf Longevity cohort, I had surfers from age 35 to 72 — some longboarding, some chasing bigger waves — and the system worked for all of them, because they each built something tailored to their own goals and life.

The hard fact is that for a lot of people who have grown up surfing, and with progression coming easily at a younger age, there must come a time in life when their physical abilities begin to tail off despite their mental game being as good as ever.

It's true that once we hit a certain age, we do need to do strength and conditioning to make sure that our bone density and our lean muscle mass maintains. And we do need to update and keep having those check-ins with our system like, okay, this system's been working for me until now, but what can I do now to mix it up and to make it better? We can keep getting better, but we have to change our mindset around it and then adapt our habits and techniques to support that progression.

Are those mindset changes more challenging for people who have always trained for physical performance or who have always been goal-oriented – asking a person to adapt to something rather than physically train their way through it?

Yes, that's one of the most common challenges — especially for lifelong athletes who are used to just grinding harder to get results. At a certain point, that stops working. The shift is from training harder to training smarter.
A simple example: you can go to the gym and lift heavy weights with bad form and get nowhere. But with good form, you don't need nearly as much volume to see results. It's less about how much you do and more about how well you do it.

I lived this myself. When I was at the peak of my big wave surfing career, I was also waiting tables at a restaurant and constantly feeling like I didn't have enough time to train. My trainer reframed everything for me — he pointed out that walking the restaurant floor was active recovery, and that I could mental surf while I was folding napkins. That completely changed how I thought about training. It wasn't about finding two hours at the gym — it was about finding ways to be efficient and integrate it into my real life.

That's the mindset shift. And yes, some people get stuck thinking it has to look one specific way. But rigidity is where things go stale — in your training and in your thinking. The athletes who keep progressing are the ones who stay curious and flexible enough to try something new.

Do you have any foundational systems that apply across the board regardless of who's coming to you with whatever aims?

Mindset in surfing is number one. Visualisation, seeing what you can be. You can have that on a macro scale or a micro scale. It could be having a dream of getting barrelled, right? But what if after all of your visualisation you get to the beach and it’s not barrelling? You have to pivot and think about what you can do on that day – you can paddle out and have a good time anyway. A lot of surfing is answering the call of the ocean, and that can require a mindset shift, which is the second big one; all conditions are good conditions.
Number three is dropping into yourself. I think this one is especially important and it's hard, but just getting calm, centered and focused with yourself. Once you're out in the lineup, being able to drop back into yourself when you notice your focus is drifting. If you can't stay dropped into yourself and focus then it's probably time to call the session

One of the tools that works for me is focusing on a certain breath technique. It’s different for everybody in terms of what works to come back into yourself in that moment.

Number four is belonging. This is a pretty big one because there are a lot of lineups that are still very male dominated. But it’s just having that feeling of belonging and especially as an adult learner surfer knowing that the ocean is for everyone. The culture has shifted so much from when I was a kid. People are so much kinder and there's more accountability. Some mindset talk that works for some people is just repeating internally “I belong.”

The fifth and final one is “dedicate don't hesitate.” It's all about commitment.
That’s a brief overview of what I think are the five most important mindset shifts to take your surfing to the next level and that would just be one component of the Surf Longevity system.

How are you applying these systems yourself, as you rehab your knee?

I've never had a competitive coach but one of my fitness coaches would always say: “Master your mind and you'll master your body.” Injuries are really hard for athletes because you can feel like you’ve lost a part of your identity. Today's day 58 and you know, it's like a real roller coaster to be injured.
I’ve got about two hours a day of recovery and corrective exercises but I am also going back to all of these mindsets to apply them while i'm not in the water. I’ve got all of this is material that I've developed that I believe in that I can apply to myself right now and it's really helping me.

We’ve talked about how you can have goals within your systems and habits. Do you still have any short or medium term goals within the big wave arena?

Definitely. Big long-term goals, I’d love to win The Eddie, are you kidding me! The Eddie is an open field event with one winner so there’s no categories, but I've been surfing against boys all my life.
And I think the dream wave for me that I haven't gotten yet is getting a barrel at Jaws, on a paddle wave. The best year ever at Jaws was the first year I surfed it, in 2016. It was 10 years ago and there hasn't really been a winter that's provided similar opportunities for big paddle barrels, but then also, there's no pressure. I'm doing this for the love and let's see what's possible. I'm always going to go with that attitude. I like to put a little pressure on myself but I also like to take it off and just see what's possible. I'm going to do my best to have fun, take good care of myself, eat healthy, apply the habits, techniques, and mindsets that could help me potentially achieve the impossible, and see what opportunities come my way.

What motivates you?
I mean, nothing motivates me more than a good near-death experience! Honestly, as dark as that sounds, it makes me feel so much more appreciation and gratitude for life. And I do love being at the leading edge of trying new things and innovation. That's why I've loved San Francisco for so long, because it’s full of people turning crazy ideas into reality.

I'd say I’m a real blend of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. If something feels really hard I usually will go out and try to do it and I’ll question why I'm doing it along the way, but then keep doing it. Or if someone tells me: “You can't do this” then I am definitely going to be like, “Well I'm going to try now that you told me that I can't.”

If you’re interested in finding out more about Bianca’s surf longevity programmes, take a look at betterwave.org