There are challenges.
For example, when you are catching a wave and you begin to paddle, you have a choice in your positioning with respect to the wave. If you are too far in front, the wave will break before it reaches you, and this is just bad news. The whitewater will make you unbalanced and in all likelihood, you will flip forward on your board and get caught under the wave. You have no control when you are under the wave. For most people, this is unpleasant.
On the other hand, if you are too far behind the wave, the wave simply glides under you. Despondently, you will watch, hapless on your board, as the wave continues, surging and breaking without you with no regard to your furious paddling. This is very sad and moreover, your fruitless paddling will make you look like amateur hour. And when you are starting out like me, you are very self-conscious about looking like amateur hour. It is one of the last things you want to be.
When I first started, I was a disaster. I wiped out, I drank a lot of seawater, and I grew frustrated. What I wanted was someone to correct me, to point out my mistakes so I could fix them. But that is not the way this works. It is an exercise that simply needs to be done again and again and the learning is individual. And after some time, I realized that once I began to get it right, I also began to increasingly perceive the maneuvers I was executing to make it right. I began to become conscious of the elements of what made things right and what made things wrong. Now, it is by no means always pretty, but I am beginning to understand how moving down a wave is supposed to feel and how it is supposed to look.
And through this, I have realized the reason I enjoy this in the first place and that reason is that the whole practice requires you to intuit, then trust, the intentions and movements of a force much greater than yourself—and only when you do this correctly are you able to stand.
