It’s the weekend. The weather is fair, you have a few hours to kill, and you feel up for an adventure. So, you grab your skateboard, spray some WD-40 into the bearings, test the wheels, and head down the hill.
A few minutes later, you are at Torrance Beach, just north of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, ready to begin an epically prosaic 44-mile journey on the Marvin Braude Bike Trail.
Because today we’re cruising the Strand.
The Marvin Braude Bike Trail, or more commonly, “the Strand,” is a 22-mile paved bike trail that runs alongside the Los Angeles coastline from Pacific Palisades to Torrance Beach. Running directly along the Pacific Ocean for most of its distance, it passes miles and miles of white sand beaches, famous local surf spots, volleyball courts, several piers, the LAX airport flight path, Ballona Creek and Marina Del Rey, iconic Venice Beach, Santa Monica, and a whole lot else. The Strand was built between 1985 and 1989, and since then has provided what is undoubtedly one of the flattest, smoothest, most scenic pathways for walkers, runners, bikers, rollerbladers, and skateboarders in the world.
But enough with the introduction, it’s time to get moving. You turn right at the bottom of the Torrance Beach ramp, onto a smoothly-paved, sidewalk-like trail that runs alongside the white sand beaches of the South Bay of Los Angeles. You can see the mighty Pacific Ocean off to your left, stretching to the horizon as far as the eye can see. You are rolling along only a few hundred feet from it, watching surfers and boats and sea birds and sometimes dolphins enjoying its splendor.
Before you know it, two miles in, you’re at the Redondo Beach pier. If you haven’t had breakfast yet, this is a good spot to grab a churro or a coffee, but I suggest waiting until further on in the journey to enjoy a heavier meal. You ride through the underground parking lot, past Quality Seafood, the Slip, Naja’s, and Captain Kidds. Watch out when you reach the Harbor Drive segment. You can ride fast on its smooth, fresh pavement, just watch out that a car doesn’t hit you as they turn into the Cheesecake Factory.
The journey has been easy so far, your legs and your lungs have opened up and everything feels good, but believe it or not, it’s about to get even easier. That’s because somewhere around Mile 3, you enter Hermosa Beach, where you glide right into the smoothest paved section of the entire Strand. A heaven for those on wheels, one where you can pump once, twice, three times, and glide for hundreds of yards, reaching speeds in excess of fifteen miles an hour, blowing past walkers, runners, and bikers alike.
This is where you feel the most noble, riding high on your skateboard, a head above the pedestrians you carve and weave around. Up here, above the clouds, you feel strong, awake, like a mounted knight, a ranger. You push the ground harder, pumping hard yet efficiently on smooth asphalt, positively flying past civilians, just . . . flying.
The easy cruise continues up to the border of Hermosa and Manhattan Beach. Here one climbs a short flight of steps to hop back onto a “normal” rougher and narrower portion of the Strand that takes you up to and through the Manhattan Beach pier. This is Volleyball Central where, more often than not, there will be some big volleyball training or tournament going on, especially in the Summer.
You’re five miles into the journey now, a respectable start, but now it’s time to put your head down and grind out some serious miles. You pass Bruce’s Beach, then El Porto, probably the best surf spot on the Strand, before riding along the spike-tipped fence of the El Segundo Powerplant. Then you pass Hammerland, another heavy South Bay wave, then the hang glider dune, the Mile 8 Resupply Café, and Dockweiler Beach, an outlier among LA beaches, where people can RV camp and have fires right on the sand.
This is the part of the trail that feels the most desolate, with seemingly endless sand dunes reminiscent of a lunar landscape. There are fewer people out here, mostly solitary surfers, hardcore runners, road bikers, and sore-footed tourists looking just a little bit lost. Planes from LAX, the worlds’ eighth busiest airport, scream overhead on their way to Hawaii, Asia, Australia, all over the world. Here the strand forks into a lower and upper section. The lower strand meanders like a Sidewinder through the sand. Only two miles or so, it feels like five. Alternatively, you can hop on the upper strand, a smoothly paved bike highway of roughly a mile-and-a-half where one can once again, pumping strongly and efficiently, reach speeds in excess of fifteen miles an hour.
One re-enters civilization again at Playa Del Rey Beach, around Mile Eleven. One sees the jetty and the mouth of the Ballona Creek fast approaching in the distance. Inevitably, you are elated to put the last five miles of sand dunes behind you and enjoy a major change of scenery.
At the Creek, one turns right, then shortly thereafter a left at the Ballona Creek Bridge. Now you ride for three-quarters of a mile or more along the Ballona Creek jetty. Cruising along a narrow strip of land, surrounded by water on both sides, it may be the most striking section of the whole trip. There are herons and kayakers, million-dollar yachts and mountains, and overshadowing everything, the enormous West LA skyline. It makes one feel small yet at the same time, gloriously free, as you fly down the jetty, with the wind at your back, moving fast, living in the moment.
This is all in preparation for crossing the greatest natural obstacle of the whole journey: Ballona Creek and the Marina. We’ve got to skirt our way around Marina Del Rey before we can resume our linear path along the beach. So, for the next few miles, we’ll be cruising past boat slips, parks, and even busy city streets, far out of sight from the ocean, on a very mediocre and uneven surface riddled with murder cracks capable of sending a skateboarder flying face first to certain injury and doom.
But fortunately, this rough detour only lasts for about two miles before you emerge onto busy Washington Blvd. Heading west, in five or ten minutes you’ll reach the beach again, but not just any beach, this is the start of world-renowned Venice Beach.
Fifteen or sixteen miles into the journey now, one third of the way there, your legs are starting to feel a little toasty. What’s more, one ankle is stiff and tender, hot spots are rising on the soles of your feet, and if your nutrition has been poorly managed, you may be experiencing the first cramps. This can be a good time to grab coconut water or a snack, maybe even lunch, but today, seeing the ocean and white sand again, that feeling you get entering Venice Beach, it re-energizes you again, so you keep pushing forward.
Venice Beach is iconic, classic Southern California, and for good reason. It’s the sights, the sounds, the smells, the homeless encampments, the street entertainers, Muscle Beach, dreadlocks, CD mix tapes, graffiti, basketball courts, and skate parks. Thronging with tourists, surfers, skaters, rip-off artists, and homeless people, everyone mixing together, getting along, smiling, laughing, feeling hip. Again, the strand meanders like a snake through these parts, but you don’t mind. In Venice Beach, no one seems to be in that much of a hurry, everyone is just here to enjoy the ride.
Venice gives way to South Santa Monica proper, and by Mile 18 you are cruising under the dark, dingy Santa Monica Pier underpass. The pier itself is undeniably fun, with lots of places to eat, good people watching, and a small amusement park even, but we are on a mission today, and the halfway point is so close now we can almost taste it. Barring an emergency cheeseburger or glass of water, we keep moving.
North of the Santa Monica pier the beach widens, and the strand surface becomes good and smooth again, bested only by the excellent stretch in Hermosa Beach. The beach is really wide here and there is not a lot of people, so despite the clean and elegant beauty of the surroundings it again feels a little desolate. The miles pass quickly.
Near Mile Twenty, two miles from the end at Will Rogers, you find yourself in the Pacific Palisades, a scenic beachside community, which, at the time of this writing, has just been ravaged by the January 2025 fires. Here, for the first time, the peace and tranquility of the Strand is touched by larger, tragic events in the real world. Many neighborhoods have been wiped out, completely burnt to the ground, lost forever. Here, for the first time, there are checkpoints, motor vehicle convoys, and National Guard troops manning the outer perimeter.
Accordingly, we will not be able to complete the full journey today. After passing a few fire-singed hillsides National Guard troops turn us around a mile-and-a-half from the end. You know what is waiting there for you, a restful little spot you’ve visited many times before, distinguished by little more than a comfortable bench and a picturesque view of a little beach cove. It’s a great place to sip a bit of water, stare off into the distance, and congratulate yourself on reaching the End of the Strand.
I hope that place is still standing. I hope I can return there when the fires have ceased. I hope it hasn’t burned to the ground.
The choice taken out of your hands; it’s time to turn around. From here on out, every push, every step forward, brings us that much closer to Home.
And that’s good, because on the way back, things will be a little tougher. Your muscles are increasingly sore, painful cramping arises, your music player dies, you grow tired of solitude and your own thoughts, you may even start feeling sorry for yourself. This is when your infantry and ranger training help the most, after the fun and romance of the journey has worn off, when your body is beaten down and your mind numbed by hours on the road.
This is when you ask yourself, Why am I doing this? I must be crazy to think this is fun.
Maybe I am. Maybe you are, too. But there is something about being out here, covering vast distances under human power, that makes you feel alive. It’s nice to step outside of normal bourgeoisie life for a few hours, to be out in nature, watching the ocean, living in the moment. On the move, I can process my past, make sense of the good and bad things I have done, and figure out how I can be better in the future. It might be the endorphins or the solitude, but I find I can process my thoughts out here better, I can think clearly, I feel gratitude, I can find my moment of Zen. Along with doing jiu jitsu and hanging out with my family, this is probably the happiest place on earth for me.
You traverse the same time and space again, in reverse, seeing everything you saw before, but from a different angle, a different mind state. Whether or not you still have music still playing in my ear, after twenty, twenty-five, thirty miles, or more, one enters a mindless flow state, a skating groove, one where one can keep going: forever. This is what humans do after all, what we have done for thousands, hundreds of thousands of years. We move long distances across the earth, under our own power, we keep rolling, we wander. It makes our food taste better, it clears our head, strengthens our muscles. It just feels . . . good.
And so we pass again through Santa Monica, Venice, the city street detour around the Marina, the Ballona Creek jetty, Playa Del Rey, and the lunar-esque wastelands of Dockweiler and El Segundo. The quadricep and hamstring muscles in my right leg might be strained and sore, my side cramping painfully, but by the time you make it back to El Porto again, back to “civilization,” after getting this far and knowing that home is only six or seven miles away, you know you are going to make it. The path home now is well-trod and very smooth. This fact gives you a mood lift, a third or maybe fourth wind, and the surety that, hell or high water, you will make it home.
Rolling, walking, or limping; you’ll make it home. Somehow.
You keep going. You pass Manhattan Pier, sail through Hermosa, smell the docks of Redondo Beach Marina. That unmistakable odor means we’re only two miles from the End now, two miles from Home. You go through Redondo Pier again, pass Topaz Jetty, the Avenue C stairs, now there is only a mile left, then it’s Burnout, Torrance Beach, until, you roll up to . . . the End.
You’ve gone 44 miles. (Well, forty at least, the Palisades is still a disaster zone, but maybe next time.) Great job! You’ve skated (or biked, ran, or walked) a distance few people ever have. You’ve seen how possible it is, how easy even, to traverse half of Los Angeles and come back again. Sure, maybe it’s difficult to walk right now and, yes, your legs will be sore tomorrow, maybe sorer than they’ve ever been, but you’ve done it, and honestly, if you really had to, you could have gone even further.
Thank you for cruising the Strand with me. Never stop moving.