I woke up today hungover from yesterday’s Linda WOD so I thought it would be a good day for a skate and it was. Instead of doing the Back Bay loop or the Santa Ana River Trail, I decided for the old stand-by, the place it all started for me on skates in California, and that was the beach strand from Newport Beach along the coast into Huntington Beach.

It was a beautiful, sunny day and the beach was almost in mid-summer form. It was crowded! The best way to envision it on skates is to imagine a video game. You are moving ahead at whatever speeds you can handle given the conditions and crowds. You don’t know what is going to jump out at you from the beach, the parking lot, bikes and much more. All you can do is anticipate and react. In Wisconsin, after the first snowfall, we would go into empty parking lots and practice spinning “donuts” with our cars. Invariably, the local law enforcement representative would drop by to find out what the hooligans were up to. I would explain that I am giving myself a driving lesson to prepare me for winter driving in the snow. The explanation always worked probably in part because it was true. This skate today was similar to that in that I got to test my agility, maneuverability and reaction time in a crowd. You might say it was a “practice run”.

I left Newport Beach City Hall on 32nd & Seashore and went to the pier and it is typically slow going there. That is where most of the close quarter encounters take place.

From there, I headed north along Seashore Drive and crossed the river jetty into Huntington Beach where the strand becomes wider and deceivingly, you can go faster for a while, but you never know who is going to cross from the parking lot to the beach and vice versa. If they look, and usually they do not, they will look one way, but not where you are coming from. (More on that later).

The stretch from the river jetty to the Huntington Beach Pier is a 5K and if you pay close attention, you can get some good speed built up and even draft off a fast cyclist from time to time, although earlier in the day is best for that. As you approach the pier, things get dicier and you have to slow down. There could be a beach volleyball tournament or a surfing competition, but on this day there was neither, and it was fairly crowded nonetheless because of the great weather. Here are a couple of shots from beneath the pier.

After passing the pier, I continued north along the bluff and parallel to Pacific Coast Hwy to the Dog Beach turnaround and headed back along the same course.

On the way back, while coming down a hill, I saw one of the many clueless cruisers making a blind u-turn into my path not hearing my yell to stay still. We crashed. I have a long-standing rule. If someone causes me to crash he is going down too and I will cushion my fall and that is what happened. I was a bit peeved and got up in his grille and had a “conversation” with him. No harm done (to me at least) and I continued on my merry way into Newport Beach.

One of the hazards of bikes and their idiotic riders (besides alcohol) is that there are many distractions. Whatever direction their head turns is the direction the bike steers, so always keep your distance and watch the head. Most of the time the distraction are hot babes in a bikini but sometimes it is something out of the ordinary, that turns heads on bicycles and foot. The worst place to be is behind the source of distraction because you essentially become invisible to them.

Yet, it was a good day in the interactive beach video game. I “only” got knocked out once over the 15.5 mile stretch but it no longer was an “active rest”. Remove “rest” and replace with “fun”!

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