Ocean Front Walk

San Diego County Craft Brewery Road Trip Week!
When the beer nerd friend I homebrew with (& fellow Unilocal Elite) planned a week vacation down in San Diego with the wife & kids, he asked if I might want to take that same week off & go down there too. Hmmm, a whole week of drinking beer at craft breweries all over San Diego County? Oh Hell yeah!
& over the course of that week, I surely did drink an ocean of beer. That was the plan, after all. Packing on pounds of body fat from all those carbs, however, was not the plan. So I got out & ran a few miles every single day. Fortunately, San Diego has no shortage of beautiful places for a little bit of outdoor exercise.
Ocean Front Walk is a great example. It’s a nice, wide, paved path that runs between the beach & mostly beachfront homes/​vacation rentals. It extends in a straight line, almost the whole way, from the Southernmost end of Mission Beach to Crystal Pier to the South end of Pacific Beach. Surf, sand & multi-​million $ homes were engaging scenery while running. But Ocean Front Walk is, in parts, a tourist trap.
So there’s also the wildlife that shows up out here. Tourists plodding along, on foot or on beach cruiser bicycles, make running here a little more like trail running. A lot of times, I had to dodge to 1 side or another, or quickly speed up, in order to squeeze by or get past clumps of folks meandering about. It was like a moving obstacle course made up of humans.
Altogether, though, it made for a more interesting run by breaking up the monotony of a long, constant, steady pace. I guess that’s why I also enjoy trail running so much. I liked running Ocean Front Walk enough that I came out here for my daily run a couple times during that personal San Diego beer week. I’m sure when I’m back in SD, I’ll be back out here running too.