On Sunday, my sisters, Irene, Dexi and I (with a couple more friends) “ran” the 99th annual Bay to Breakers 12k. I put ran in-between quotes cos you couldn’t really run this event (unless, of course, you were part of the elites at the very front corral).

The Faeries

Getting to corral

Jabba and Leia

Tightly packed

Nearly there

The Start Line
The morning started off well — since my sisters, friends and I were in the official hotel, the start line was just two blocks away. We had our oatmeal, coffee and went through the morning routine. Then, we donned our costumes (we were faeries!) and met up with the rest of the fairies and non-costumed members of our group at around 7:15AM.

By 8AM, we were still NOT at the start line. LOL. Yes, there were that many participants. Whilst waiting, we were being pelted with flying tortillas. Apparently, it’s tradition — people would bring tortilla rounds and just toss them in the air. Then, the tortillas are picked up off the ground and re-tossed. If you think they’re harmless, tortillas travelling at like, breakneck speeds really hurt. OK, they really didn’t hurt that much but they were annoying! In fact, I used my wand to swat away any incoming tortillas. >_<

We did see some interesting characters whilst attempting to get into our corral, though. From Jabba the Hutt and the slave Leia to the Gingerbread man, to a group of “ka-cawing” ladies dressed as, er, I’m guessing they were crows or summat. LOL. No naked people sightings yet, but I’ll talk about those later. The atmosphere was essentially West Hollywood… On steroids! Ha!

It felt like forever, just standing in place and waiting for the crowd to mooooove. At this point, you can start smelling people who are already drunk and the smoke off the participants who were lighting up (yesh, you can tell they brought their recreational smokes to this race!) I guess that’s an omen for things to come.

When we were finally close to the start line, my Garmin still wouldn’t find a signal (I suspect it’s cos of the buildings and how packed we were) — it’s not like it would’ve mattered anyway but I would’ve wanted to see the route, as recorded by my own watch

We finally crossed the start line an HOUR after we made our trek towards it! We thought we had found relief as soon as we crossed the threshold, but we were only able to jog for a few yards when we were met with a big wall of runners and walkers. The suggestion by the race announcer over the PA asking walkers to keep right and runners to keep left fell on deaf ears. >_< I don’t blame them, though. How would you really enforce this when a great number were already half drunk! Haha.

As I mentioned, this was not an event you’d race unless you were at the corral for the elite runners.

The Course
As if getting to the start line was a challenge, it practically took us about an hour to reach the three and a half mile-mark. The course was sooooo packed and it did not let up until mile seven (this was a 7.45 mi race). ACK. I’m not saying we weren’t having fun, but it was kind of frustrating to run/jog and then be blocked by walkers.

When we did run, we were weaving through the crowd with our faery wings flapping and moving about our backs. At one point we had to stop  (I think around mile 4), to fix our wings because it got so bad, we were hitting people left and right! HAHAHA. We weren’t getting any nasty looks, though, cos the people we hit knew there wasn’t really any space. Irene’s friend, Patrick, helped “straighten” up our wings so that they weren’t so spread out, and that totally helped.

The hills on this course were equally challenging! I mean, it’s San Francisco, so it’s expected, yeah? But even jogging/walking up them was laborious!

Towards the end, we really needed to keep running — we were about to hit the 2-hour mark and we needed to get back to our hotel to check-out! It probably took us another hour to get back to our hotel (the $15 we paid for to get on the official shuttle back to the start line from the finish was NOT worth it, btw. I think walkers would’ve made it back quicker than we did!)

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