Leonland - Leon Barnard
Chapter 3 > Bay to Breakers, San Francisco
Bay to Breakers, the world's largest footrace, is an amazing annual event in San Francisco. It's a 7.5 mile course from the San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean through the heart of the city. I'm not much of a runner, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to participate in this unique experience. I had to stop and walk a few times, but I still completed the race well ahead of 20 or 30,000 people and that was good enough for me.
This was possibly the craziest part of the race. There were 50,000+ people crammed into a street a few blocks long.
This is what I saw behind me.
And this is what I saw in front of me. You'll notice some white circles in the air, those were tortillas that people were throwing around.
This hill was probably the toughest part of the race for me. But seeing all these other people do it helped me out a lot. It made me feel pretty good to be ahead of Batman.
Taking pictures while running is not the easiest thing to do. Here's one picture that I took that I find pretty amusing. There was a group of dentistry students who ran the whole race with an inflatable toothpaste tube above them. I tried to take a picture while I was running, but the camera was tilted too high, so I only captured it from the tube up.
Here's me (on the left) with my two running mates. I don't think I could've made it without my friend Matt (in the middle) encouraging me along the way. I look exhausted, huh?
I wasn't the fastest person in the race, but here's a bunch of people that had about a mile left that we saw on our way back.
The people in the previous picture were the ones who were actually trying, here's just a few of the interesting folks we saw after that; notice that nobody is running. That's another thing that makes this race unique, the variety of people who participate.
More cleverly-dressed participants. At least they were dressed. I saw more naked runners that day than I care to mention.
Posted by Leon on May 10, 2001 11:23 PM [Top of page]