VENTURA : Lifeguards Take Part in Competition

If a lifeguard competition conjures up images of scantily clad studs comparing tans, the contests held at San Buenaventura State Beach Saturday might have changed your mind.

In the first of a series of contests on California beaches, about 200 male and female lifesavers proved they are more than mere beach ornaments.

Contestants swam, surfed, paddled surfboards and rowed 300-pound boats in races held from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. And they did it all very fast.

The winners of the series, which ends Aug. 18 in Malibu, will win $25,000. Six of the winners will go on to an international lifeguard competition in Hawaii in late August.

Ventura resident Griff Hutton, who placed second in Saturday’s paddle board race, said the competition is a good way to keep in shape.

“I think people would be pretty surprised if they realized how good of an athlete some of us are,” he said.

Hutton works full time as a lifeguard at San Buenaventura State Beach and at Carpinteria State Beach in Santa Barbara County during the summer. For the rest of the year, he is a graduate student in exercise physiology at the University of Nebraska.

“In the Midwest, they don’t really understand why I work out at all,” Hutton, 31, said. Some of his school friends think someone Hutton’s age should be happy “to just sit on the couch and drink beer.”

Hutton said his summer job gives him more exercise than participating in the contests does. During his 11 years as a lifeguard, he has saved hundreds of lives, including rescuing 114 people during the busy summer of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, he said.

One of the top female lifeguard contestants, Patty Richards, said most people she rescues act as if they weren’t in any danger. In these cases, “you just try to lead them to safer waters,” said Richards, who won races Saturday in surfing, paddling a surfboard and the 400-yard sprint swim.

Randy Eickhoff, who works with Richards at Solana Beach near San Diego, said the speed and strength demonstrated in the competition “are the same skills we use in rescue work.”

The lifeguard competition is part of an Ocean Festival Series sponsored by the Professional Surf Lifesaving Assn. and Anheuser-Busch Cos.

The sponsors also held a volleyball competition for professional and amateur players and a regatta co-sponsored by the Kalifornia Outrigger Assn.