Left Coast Low Down
Adventure Racing in the land of fruits and nuts

He also echoes my father-in-law in calling this "the land of fruits and nuts," a disparagement that we actually take pride in. And just to start things off on an appropriately discursive note, my first post has nothing to do with AR.

It starts with my heading last Saturday to Wise Surfboards in San Francisco. Approaching the shop means heading down the precipitous slope of the Great Highway, past the tourist landmark Cliff House. If you watched the X-Games when they were held in San Francisco, you'll recognize the road as the site of the worst wipe-outs ever recorded in Downhill skateboarding.

In the car with me were my two sons: Will, age 11, and Griffin, age 9. After you pass the Cliff House, you're able to see the surf conditions at Ocean Beach, a notoriously brutal, shark-infested and sloppy beach break, where only highly skilled and monstrously fit surfers can even make it outside the impact zone on a big day.

On this day, however, my attention was drawn away from the surf towards the beach, where it looked like some people were playing rugby.

Now, if there's anything that I love more than adventure racing (or surfing) - it's rugby. I played it in high school, in college, at the Division One club level as an adult and even on a smattering of representative sides. I had to give the game up after eleven seasons, because my frail frame just couldn't sustain the damage inherant to the competition - but I love the game like junkies love free methodone.

Will and Griffin are mainstays of the Marin Youth Rugby Program, which I coach, and so I thought it would be fun, as we swerved into the parking lot - all thoughts of the surf shop gone - to jump into the game.

My sons were appalled. "DAD! We don't even know them"

But I had already busted out of the car and was running to the beach to join the game, and they were compelled to follow, because even in their mortification they knew that fun follows Dad like smell follows a fart.

Sure enough, the 20-odd fellows on the beach welcomed us gladly, as I knew they would. Shoes off and into the game we went, and very quickly it was apparent that this was a kind of unusual squad.

I identified with many of the players right away; they were the types of guys with whom I spent a large portion of my young adulthood. Others were...different.

No less skilled, no less rough-hewn or filled with bonhomie. Just...maybe...

(Living in the San Francisco area all your life gives even the straightest guy a finely attuned Gaydar. And mine was pinging like a nuclear sub.)

"What club are you guys with?" I asked a couple minutes into the scrimmage, after passing the ball to a teammate who was dressed in a really fetching warm-up suit.

"The Fog," replied the dude, and it all came clear. The San Francisco Fog - a Division 3 squad, is famous for two things. The first is that it was the home team of Mark Bingham, one of the heroes of 9/11. And most famously - the team is one of the few in the world manned predominently with gay men.

Make that WAS predominently gay - unless my Gaydar was faulty, I was picking up a very confusing mix of gay and straight - an impression confirmed later by another source in the NorCal D3 league, who said, "They're only, like, half-gay now, which bums me out. They're harder to beat now."

So there we were, on a beach in San Francisco: a bunch of gay and straight men playing one of the most brutal games in the world, two little blonde kids embarassing adults with preternatural jinks and speed, and one broken-down dad looking for good waves.

We played well past exhaustion. We played until our legs were shaking and two guys were puking. We played until all perceived barriers of age, sexual orientation, machismo and cultural stereotypes were broken down. We played until the tide went out and the ocean was smooth, and we left the beach with new friends and a reinforced belief in the transcendant community of sports.