I ran on, past Carlsbad and Oceanside, familiar places from my time in San Diego. Carlsbad was where I ran my first marathon in California and where I had gone to see a number of concerts.
I stopped in a cafe to recharge my phone and get a vegetable sandwich, bagel with peanut butter, and coffee. I put in ten or more miles in the early morning but was feeling fatigued from the lack of sleep. I had a talk with my parents on the phone to check in. My left arch was hurting me, it seemed the extra foam the technician had added to the custom made insole was too much. I tried to shave it down by rubbing in against the cement. Every opportunity I got I would run barefoot on the beach.
I made it to the gate for Camp Pendleton. The guard directed me to the visitor center, where I had a long conversation with the woman behind the counter. She said that bikers with bikes and helments were allowed to cross the base, but not pedestrians, a new rule. She said that I would need an in-person escort with base access to be allowed through the gate. I told her I had had a DoD SMART scholarship in graduate school and was waiting for a security clearance right now -- that didn't matter. Thinking about the spirit of doing a self-supported run though, I figured that base access is something that might not be available to every person trying to do the trail. So, it made sense not to try to use anything specific to myself or my friends (I did have one friend who had offered to help me through one of his contacts at the base) to gain access. The woman behind the counter was nice enough to Google whether highway running was allowed and couldn't find anything prohibiting it, she directed me to some restaurants nearby.
I backtracked to the Denny's and ate a big meal of hashbrowns, fruit, and toast, with lots of coffee, in anticipation of another 20+ mile segment on the highway. Finally ready to go I jogged over -- only to find a large "no pedestrians allowed" sign!
With no other recourse, I decided calling an Uber/Lyft was my only option. I had run the idea of Uber/Lyft by a moderator on the FKT proboard site and they had said it would make sense if that was the only option, and if the car service was available to everyone. Within minutes my driver arrived and I directed him to take the first possible exit. The woman at the visitor center had told me where the base ended and I triple checked my maps to be sure I wouldn't miss any segments of the trail / would have the shortest possible car ride.
Things seemed to work out well, he dropped me off at San Onofre State Beach, where I made my way down to the Ocean. It was a 20 mile car ride.
I was relieved to be hiking along the calm beach again. There were hardly any people, unlike the beaches I had come through in San Diego that were filled with crowds day and night. I saw many shelters made with large branches along the beach, and a group of surfers, which made me feel somehow at home. The Camp Pendleton experience was jarring. I hiked a few miles down the beach, and opted to take a half mile detour into the town of San Clemente to stay at a hostel, where I had booked a room earlier, thinking I would run the twenty miles of highway. I had been tempted to cancel my reservation and put in more miles, but the sun was setting and I was ready to be around some free spirits. The hostel, House of Trestles, was filled with surf paraphernalia and graffiti artwork done by LA street artists-in-residence. It was a welcome haven complete with a washer and dryer where I happily washed my clothes.
I talked to one of the employees who was formerly a professional/sponsored surfer and shared a room with a German backpacker who planned to take surfing lessons at the beach nearby in the morning. The group had gone on a bar crawl the night before, missing it was bittersweet, it would have been fun to meet the interesting people associated with the hostel, but would also have taken time and likely left me with a hangover. Probably good I missed it. I thoroughly enjoyed all of the artwork though. It refreshed me and I thought about how doing my artist residency at the Vermont Studio Center two years ago after my series of six 100 mile races in eight weeks and subsequent injuries had similarly renewed me, and led to my comeback 17:24 100 mile race. Maybe a mental break from running, experiencing something in a completely different realm, like art, renews the body somehow too. I remember reading that the king of ultra running, Yiannis Kouros, had a number of hobbies outside running.
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