The Bay to Breakers is Decadent and Depraved (But Not for Me)

Awaiting the start of the 2023 Bay to Breakers

In American horse racing, the month of May is dominated by the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes, the first two legs of the Triple Crown that are known as much for their party scenes as they are for their racing.

The city of San Francisco has a similar event every May, but instead of horses racing 1 ¼ or 1 3/16 miles it features people running and walking 12 kilometers from the skyscrapers near the bay, through the Hayes Valley neighborhood and up the notorious Hayes Street Hill, past the Panhandle and into Golden Gate Park, and ending along the Great Highway within view of the Pacific Ocean.

The Bay to Breakers, which was inaugurated in 1912 as the Cross City Race as a way to lift the city's spirits following the devastating 1906 earthquake, is a race that captures the spirit of San Francisco. Over the years the race has been won by elite runners from all over the world, but unlike races like the Boston Marathon and New York City Marathon that require qualifying times to enter and have an air of exclusivity, the Bay to Breakers is all about inclusivity.

Participants include first-time runners, walkers, parents jogging with their children, and smattering of nudists. Many wear costumes, giving the event a Halloween or Mardi Gras feel. One of the race's best traditions are the people who wear salmon costumes and travel "upstream" by running in the opposite direction.

In effect, the Bay to Breakers is a road race in the front, a costume parade in the middle, and a slowly moving street party in the rear. “It’s one-quarter Mardi Gras, one-quarter Boston Marathon, one quarter Pride and a little bit of Halloween thrown in there, too,” said Kyle Meyers, who owns Silverback, the events company that serves as a manager partner for the Bay to Breakers, when speaking to San Francisco-based public television and radio station KQED. The race and its zaniness are mentioned in a non-sequitur scene in the wonderfully awful film The Room, which is set in San Francisco.

A microcosm of the race is its unique centipede division, which has teams of 13 runners that are tied together by a bungee cord. Some of the centipede teams run at a sub-5:30/mile pace while others treat the event more like a costume competition.

A serious centipede (the LinkedIn team) approaches the finish of the 2010 Bay to Breakers. Photo by Flickr user smil23le. License.

And a not-so-serious centipede in the festival area of the 2023 edition.

But much of the race's reputation comes not from its registered runners and walkers but rather from those on the periphery who use the event as an excuse to party on a Sunday morning. DJs play music along the notorious Hayes Street Hill and bands can be found along the sidelines in the Panhandle and in Golden Gate Park. A lot of the less-serious participants quit at Hayes Street or along the Panhandle and locals join them on the sidewalk or even in the street to dance and drink and sometimes use psychoactive substances. This, understandably, has led to complaints from local residents about noise, vomit, and public urination and circa 2009 the city of San Francisco and race directors began to crackdown on some of the debauchery. These changes as well as the two-year COVID-19 hiatus has led to a decline in the party scene, which has been a relief to some and lamented by others. Still, even though the event has lost some of its craziness, it still stands out compared to other road races in the United States.

 This group at the 2023 Bay to Breakers honored the internet-famous dancing pallbearers from Ghana. Photo by Flickr user Tom Hilton. License.

As a somewhat serious but ultimately unremarkable runner and a total square who lives on the other side of the country, it might seem foolish for somebody like me to participate in the Bay to Breakers. A runner with my talent giving an all-out effort in the Bay to Breakers is comparable to somebody going to the Kentucky Derby with a $20 gambling budget and a pledge to abstain from consuming alcohol. Sure, you can do it, but you won't win anything of consequence and you will miss out on the fun. And yet that's exactly what I did this year. But why?

Well, for one, it's sort of a family tradition. My maternal grandfather became interested in running during the running boom of the 1970s and in 1977 ran it with my mother. My mother ran solo the following year as a bandit (unregistered participant) before properly participating with her father and sister in 1987 when I was 22 months old.

When I was 12 years old (1997) I ran on my school’s track team and my mother recommended that we run the Bay to Breakers together. I must admit that as a sprinter who was growing up in a tame suburb that I found the 12-kilometer distance, nudists, and other sensory aspects to be overwhelming, but ultimately I was glad we participated and that my mother encouraged me to run the whole distance when I was tired and wanted to walk. My favorite memory from the 1997 race was the one set of runners carrying a Hale-Bopp comet float and a second set toting an alien spacecraft behind them, a dark-yet-mirthful reference to the then-recent Heaven's Gate suicides.

Another reason why I wanted to run in the Bay to Breakers was to maintain a connection to my home state. In high school I was a mediocre 400-meter runner on my school's track team but by the time I had graduated I was burnt out on running. I did not start running semi-seriously again until I was in my early 30s and living in Maine. While I have enjoyed the races in the East, I found myself wanting to re-experience the festivity of the Bay to Breakers.

So that's what I decided to do. In the winter I booked a trip to California and also convinced my mother to register for the race. Having the Bay to Breakers on my calendar for May 21 inspired me to train regularly through the later winter and early spring in Maine when I often have to pick between running in the cold and wind or coping with the monotony of a treadmill or an indoor track.

I never seriously considered wearing a costume, but I deliberately chose to acknowledge my dual West Coast and East Coast identities by wearing my Bay Meadows Racecourse baseball cap and my neon yellow t-shirt from Back Cove Weekly 5k series in Maine.

We took BART from Millbrae to Embarcadero and then parted ways about 45 minutes before the race to enter our respective corrals. The race begins in the Financial District and during the 7 o'clock hour the sky was foggy and the tops of the tallest skyscrapers could not be seen. One Bay to Breakers tradition is the tossing of tortillas before the start, and I felt like a ninja when one bounced off my head and I snatched it with one hand before flinging it backward and hoping it did not hit an unsuspecting runner behind me. I saw my first bare rear ends as two nude men stood near the front of the "B" corral. There was another man nearby who was still clothed but was wearing a "Bare to Breakers" cap and who was toting a small backpack, so I knew that the cap would be all he was wearing once the race started.

The first group of participants (the seeded and sub-seeded runners with qualifying times and all centipedes) were sent on their way at 8:00, and my group in corral “A” heard the starter's horn at 8:03. I was worried that I would get stuck behind some of the slower centipedes during the first mile, but by the time I had caught up to them there was plenty of space to pass them. A few walking bandits had already made their way onto the course and some were casually strolling two- and three-abreast, and although I was annoyed by the breach in etiquette I was able to navigate around them without much trouble.

I settled into a 7:00/mile pace and was running comfortably when we made the turn onto Hayes Street. Here the skyline opens up and you can also see the steep hill ahead. To make the climb seem even more daunting, I could feel a headwind. The Hayes Street climb begins right around the two-mile marker and I found myself having to find a balance between maintaining a decent pace when going up the 201-foot incline (with an average grade of 5.5% and a maximum grade of 11.5%, the Hayes Street Hill was named one of running’s “sublime climbs” by Runner’s World in 2008) and not exhausting my legs when I still have approximately five miles left to run. I looked at my Garmin watch and kept my heart rate between 183 and 185 and saw at the top of the hill my average pace for the whole race until that point was 7:15/mile, so I felt confident I could beat my loftiest goal time of completing the race in less than 52 minutes as the course was net downhill from there.

During the Hayes incline I passed a woman who was wearing a pink dress and carrying a bouquet and a man who was wearing a faux tuxedo T-Shirt and dragging plastic cups behind him. One spectator yelled "Did you just get married?" and they replied in the affirmative, prompting a hearty "Congratulations!" from the spectator. I also saw the salmon standing on the left sidewalk and I yelled "All right, salmon!" and gave one of them a high five. The Hayes Street party scene had not really started yet as I passed only one DJ playing music outside one of the narrow Victorian-era homes that give the neighborhood its identity.

Apart from a few small hills, the course plateaus at the top of Hayes Street, during a brief stint along Divisadero Street, and past the Panhandle (this park received its name because from above it appears to stick out from the much larger Golden Gate Park) along Fell Street. The number of spectators decreased significantly upon entering Golden Gate Park and the sidewalks had a few walkers, joggers, and cyclists who seemed to have a minimal interest in the race.

The 3 ½-mile stretch through Golden Gate Park is almost exclusively downhill, which made me feel like a speed demon as I ran at a 6:35/mile pace even though it was gravity that was doing a lot of of the work. I passed two of the centipede teams from the Impala Running Club in their matching cat eye masks and tails. I also passed a male runner who was wearing nothing but running shoes and a pink thong, but it was nothing like my 1997 experience when I saw so many nude walkers. One man stood in the middle of the road and held a "FREE HUGS" sign, but I did not see any of us semi-serious runners take him up on the offer. I did give him a high-five, though.

Near the end of the race the course goes by the Golden Gate Park bison paddock where the residents were lounging and grazing contentedly while us masochistic runners were making our final push to the finish line. Upon passing the Dutch-style Murphy Windmill at the southwest edge of the park and making the final turn onto the Great Highway, I began my final kick, using my quarter-miler speed to try to knock off a few seconds off my final time. The MC at the finish line saw me and my florescent yellow shirt coming and yelled "Looking good in the neon!" and I crossed the line with an official net time of 50:48, exactly 15 minutes slower than the race's winner Colin Bennie, the top-finishing American at the 2021 Boston Marathon. I was happy with my time and how fresh I still felt but also a little annoyed with myself for not pushing a little harder in the final mile.

The Bay to Breakers route as tracked by my Garmin watch.

In the finish line festival area I picked up my medal, sampled various Kodiak Cakes products, expressed my sympathies to a woman in a Philadelphia Flyers shirt and a Gritty hat ("I'm sorry your team has had such bad management."), and tried not to freeze from the cold wind blowing in from the Pacific Ocean. I was worried that my mother would not be able to find me in the crowd after she finished, but we successfully spotted each other and took a few pictures before slowly walking toward our shuttle back to downtown San Francisco.

I'm sure many others have come away from the Bay to Breakers with stories that are more interesting than mine (like this nudist’s account of the 2023 Bay to Breakers or this writer’s story about running while pushing a keg of beer decades ago). Decadence and depravity may not be my style, but even a square like me can sometimes enjoy being adjacent to those things.

The Bay to Breakers has a multigenerational history in my family.