Running down urban stress

The mountain trail soars for the first two miles, switching back and forth above the beach to the sound of pounding surf a thousand feet below.

“The second time I ran here, I fell -- because of the view,” Mohan Bhasker says, moving fast through the chaparral in Point Mugu State Park about 15 coast-hugging miles south of Oxnard. “You’ll see.”

Bhasker, 52, is director of gastroenterology at Gardena Memorial Hospital. He lives in Palos Verdes and runs early Sunday mornings in the Santa Monica Mountains with the Trail Runners Club started by Stan Swartz, who’s somewhere out ahead of him.

The 10.7-mile course starts on a portion of the trail named for the late Ray Miller, the California park system’s first official camp host.

The morning is so clear Bhasker can see the main Channel Islands to the north and, when he gets to the top of the ridge, San Nicolas Island about 60 miles out at sea, due southwest.

Soon the trail turns away from the water and into the Santa Monicas, with Sandstone Peak, the range’s tallest mountain at 3,111 feet, looming in the distance. Then it turns and traverses the La Jolla Valley, a grassland that looks like a piece of Wyoming, before it comes around to the coastline again on the right side of Mugu Peak.

Bhasker came to the United States from India in 1977 to study medicine at UCLA. He cursed when his alarm went off at 4:30 a.m. He drove an hour, much of it in the darkness, to get here -- the price he pays to escape.

“My job is so stressful, and the people I meet at work, they are so into what they do that they’re outlooks are so narrow,” he says. “The people I meet here, we have the same outlook.”

Bhasker, a wisp of a man who weighs no more than 140 pounds, is running with Kate Wesseling, 31, a pediatrician at UCLA medical school; Larry Young, 56, a physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; and Richard Hammond, an architect who’s helping design Google’s new headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

“We are here, we’re athletes, and our values in life are different,” says Bhasker, who started trail running three years ago. He found the experience so enthralling that he now returns to the trails he likes most with a camera, to experience them in another dimension. “I’ve done this trail backpacking, hiking and shooting,” he says, meaning pictures.

Bhasker’s foursome passes Swartz as the trail winds its way around Mugu Peak. Swartz, a retired contractor from Pacific Palisades, is 70 now and not as fast as he once was, so he starts each run early with a slower group of runners. Since he formed the club in 1988, he’s only missed six Sundays. The trail down Mugu Peak is steep and rocky, but Bhasker’s foursome is slowed only slightly by the terrain. It’s just after 9, the sun is painting the coastline gold, and hikers coming up the other way on the trail stare in awe at the runners barreling down the mountain.

The four skip across a stream on rocks, and if the ocean and the mountains haven’t been enough, there’s a waterfall and a swimming hole in La Jolla Canyon that, thanks to the rains, weren’t there two months ago when Bhasker last ran this route.

Somebody in the group lets out a whoop as the end approaches and two doctors, a scientist and an architect take off in a full sprint down a sandy road that leads back to the parking lot, like kids.

“It’s an adventure,” Bhasker says. “You just enjoy it for what it is.”

The particulars

Where: Point Mugu State Park in Ventura County.

What: A scenic and hilly 10.7-mile loop -- with an elevation gain and loss of about 2,000 feet -- that snakes through La Jolla Valley and skirts Mugu Peak.

How: Take Pacific Coast Highway 26 miles north of Santa Monica or 15 miles south of Oxnard to the signed La Jolla Canyon parking lot (parking fee is $4 per car). To run with the club, visit www.trailrunnersclub.com.

Back story: Sandstone Peak, the highest point in the Santa Monica Mountains, is actually named Mt. Allen. And it’s made of andesite breccia, not sandstone.

You can reach Vernon Loeb via e-mail at vernon.loeb@latimes.com.

Do you have a favorite hike you want to share? Invite us to tag along. E-mail us at takeme@latimes.com.