Let me start this by saying that I usually take races pretty
seriously. My normal routine is to go to bed early and refrain from
drinking booze or eating sweets the two days before--the night before
Bay to Breakers I was out drinking until 1:30am.
This
weekend I was visiting my brother at Stanford (he graduates in three
weeks!) and neither of us had ever done B2B so we decided to sign up. We
got put in the 16:00min/mile corral because it's first-come-first-serve
and we signed up late so our plan was just to sit back and enjoy the
ride. The morning of the race we got up at 5:45am to make sure we had
plenty of time to drive into SF. We made some bagels, got into our
costumes, and hopped in the car. By 7 am we’d snagged a good spot in a
parking garage two blocks from the stop. We did a few shots of Grand
Marnier, made the final costume adjustments and headed to the start.
Above is a picture of the two of us at the start (I’m in the halter top on the right). This
is the largest road race in the country (around 75,000 people) so the
starting corrals were made. Nevertheless, we snuck into a faster corral
(12min/mile or something like that). There were thousand of small
tortillas be tossed through the air like frisbees and hundreds of beach
balls bouncing too! At this point we both realized how awesome this was
going to be.
The gun went off around 8 (no national anthem which was weird) but it took us quite a while to get to the start. There was a guy dressed as a giant (7ft+) carrot who ran with the bulky outfit
for the whole way!!! Once we started moving we got to see all the crazy
costumes both on the course and on the sidelines. We even ran into some
of my brothers friends in the first mile.
A
little after mile 1 we saw these guys, a row of bacon drinking Coors
Lite!!! Soon we passed a bar selling jello shots and “beer to go” to
runners. Definitely not your average race! 
After mile 2 the course has
its only steep hill. As we were running up it, a large group in salmon
costumes came running down saying “we’re swimming upstream to spawn!!!”
They were followed by people dressed as grizzlies! We
continued on and saw bunch more awesome costumes. I took pictures of
some, like the penguin with an igloo, but missed others, like the group
standing in Christmas sweaters next to an artificial Christmas tree. Did
I mention there were hundreds of people running in the buff? Most had
the same hat on, so I’m guessing they were part of a group. After
running through city streets, we entered Golden Gate Park. The park was
beautiful, but there were fewer people party along the sidelines
there.
Anyway, we finished the 12k in around 1:22. Probably the slowest
race I’ve ever done, but by far the most fun!!! I’ll definitely be back.
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