Venice Beach

I took a comp day off work on Friday to catch up from being out of town in Lexington, KY for work last weekend. I spent the whole day doing the stuff that falls behind when work & travel take a front seat to domestic duties. I spent the morning at the Harley-Davidson shop getting the 15,000 mile service done to my bike as well as get a new front tire. Then I came home so the plumber could fix the running toilet and clogged tub drain at my apartment. Sometimes I enjoy being a renter as opposed to the owner!

With domestic duties behind me, I had Saturday & Sunday to do as I pleased. After breakfast and time wasted trying to locate the neighbor who had blocked in my Harley (drawback of being a renter with limited parking space), I hopped on my bike and headed north to visit a friend now living in Los Angeles. Since working with Liz back in Colorado Springs at the Olympic Training Center, she has moved out to the Los Angeles area to pursue playing professional soccer. What a great excuse to cruise up the coast for a few hours!

I rolled into town just a few minutes before Liz and Amy pulled up to their apartment building after a morning of training. After they got cleaned up from practice, they took me out to Venice Beach for a little sightseeing and some lunch. During my hard-core lifting days (relatively speaking anyway!) in Navy weight rooms back in the mid to late 1990s we got all our workouts from magazines like Muscle & Fitness and Muscle Mag. Being the token female on work shifts and aircrews, I adopted the workout routines of the guys I worked and flew with. At the time, we had no aspirations other than to be strong and BIG! In hindsight and with the perspective of now working with high-level athletes, I have to laugh at the things we did in pursuit of bulging muscles and veins! That period of my life is what piqued my curiosity in training and ultimately led to my career path in exercise physiology and nutrition. Without formal education in exercise or nutrition, we fell for every magazine workout routine, diet and supplement out there. It was then that I started wanting to know more and no longer trusted what was printed by the "experts" as fact. Although too late, to make this long story short (or at least shorter), it was those years as a gym rat back in the Navy that spurred me to see Muscle Beach.

Muscle Beach was originally located in Santa Monica, but moved down to Venice Beach to become the fitness mecca it is now known for back in the 1930s. Pick up any bodybuilding magazine circa 1970s and you're sure to see pictures of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Franco Columbo and other body builders working out in "the pen." Although it was legendary back in the day, there didn't seem to be a whole lot of folks pumping iron in it this Saturday. Right behind the pen on the beach is a gymnastics area that has parallel bars, speed bags, rope climbs, gymnast rings and other apparatus. It must've been a sight to see back in Jack LaLanne's day! I couldn't resist getting a picture of Liz & Amy on the chin-up bar. For some reason they couldn't seem to synchronize their efforts and it took a couple of pull-ups on their parts before I got this picture of the two of them at the top! I knew it wouldn't be too strenuous for them though; they both play semi-pro soccer for the Pali Blues soccer team.

Unfortunately, my "hard core" workout days are long gone and I knew I wouldn't be able to muster even one pull-up! Being a good sport, Liz just hung on the chin-up bar with me for this photo op! With lunch and all that exercise behind us, Liz & Amy took me to one of their favorite dessert shops: Pinkberry! After tasting my personalized concoction, I wasn't disappointed with this stop. I added ripe mango and blueberries to the relatively unsweetened frozen plain yogurt which proved to be a delicious combination.

I thoroughly enjoyed my afternoon in LA with Liz & Amy, but it was time for me to head back down to San Diego. I wanted to hit the road so that I wouldn't have to do too much riding in the chilly night air once the sun went down. Yes, even in Southern California I'm still a wuss in the cold! We parted with plans already in the making for my next trip up and their trip down to San Diego for a visit. My afternoon with them reminded me how we're all surrounded by fun, sincere people if we just slow down a bit and allow ourselves to recognize them.