celebration

It’s just before 8am on a mid-May Sunday morning in San Francisco. A girl stumbles out of a bus and loses the most recent meal she’s eaten on the sidewalk as if it’s a Saturday night. You see group after group of people in coordinated costumes role playing as if it’s Halloween. As you walk towards the bay, you see little corn tortillas covering the ground as if several tortilla-filled trucks collided and spilled their contents all over the street. What the hell is going on? It must be Bay to Breakers.

Bay to Breakers (B2B) is San Francisco’s annual race from the bay to the ocean. After the real competitors take off, it is one of the city’s most notorious WTF? events where people congregate to celebrate and indulge in absurdity. After years of not making it to the event, I finally attended my first B2B this past weekend. Now that I’ve been, I concur with the masses that everyone should try it at least once. Here were some memorable parts of Bay to Breakers:

Naked people

The Bad:
You’ll see exhibitionists at any large event in San Francisco, but at B2B, they are sometimes running.

The Ugly:
Someone in a trench coat may appear to be dressed, but to your surprise, he will give you a full frontal reveal when he turns around.

Baby strollers without babies

The Good:
Baby strollers equipped with stereos and loudspeakers blaring upbeat music for everyone around to enjoy as they walk or run.

The Funny:
A baby stroller full of little jello shots to share with fellow revelers.

Bathrooms every block or so

The Good:
Most people are not at B2B to race, they are there to party. No one stands a chance against the Kenyans anyway. The people who plan the event know what most people are there for, so they put up Porta Potties every block or two along the way.

The Bad:
Even with bathrooms everywhere, the lines are incredibly long. And as you start to get close to the front of the line, someone in a viking costume might invite five fellow vikings to cut in line with him.

The race course

The Good:
The race is almost entirely flat except for one hill on Hayes Street that goes by the Painted Ladies of Full House fame. This allows the people who are not racing (the bulk of the participants) to put forth as little effort as possible and focus on what they came to do: party.

The Funny:
Many do not make it to the end of the race at the ocean. By the time you reach Golden Gate Park, crowds have dispersed and people have headed home to pass out or have gone somewhere else to continue the party.

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The first round of contestants come around the corner.

One of San Francisco’s secrets is that Lombard Street is not the city’s “crookedest street”. Vermont Street, between 20th and 22nd Streets, is the true winner of that title. But unlike Lombard Street with its highly manicured vegetation and showy homes, Vermont Street is largely unkempt, “out of the way” and hard to photograph. With not a lot of traffic going down the street, it’s a great location for San Francisco’s annual “Bring Your Own Big Wheel” Race (BYOBW) which was formerly held on Lombard Street.

The event happens every Easter, rain or shine. This year, it happened to be raining sideways on Easter Sunday. Relaxing in the warm indoors sounded like the most appealing way to spend the afternoon. But at the last minute, I decided I couldn’t miss out on the once a year event. So I bundled up, grabbed an umbrella and took advantage of the rain to wash off the mud caked on my shoes from the previous Monday’s hike.

Approaching Vermont Street, I could see that plenty of people were not deterred by the weather. Many were in costume and carrying their own plastic tricycles. Being Easter, the most common costumes were bunnies, but some other notable costumes were hot dogs, Wonder Woman, and of course, men dressed as women.

As soon as the race began, I knew I’d made the right decision to go. Words, pictures or even videos can’t fully describe the hilarity of it all. Try to imagine grown people in ridiculous costumes trying to navigate sharp curves in little plastic tricycles made for someone a fraction of their size. And some had most likely had a few too many mimosas at brunch earlier in the day.

Tricycles were not the only “vehicles” present– there were carts that looked like they were meant to be underbed storage, surfboards on wheels, and somehow a few were maneuvering around the corners on garbage bins with two wheels. The most important rule is that your wheels are not made of rubber. This allows for a maximum amount of wipe outs.

There are many different riding styles. Some racers are all about speed and getting down the mountain first. Some are more into the show and interested in playing the character they dressed up as. And others use the turtle’s motto, “slow and steady wins the race.” The stragglers were either heckled or encouraged with cheers as they timidly made their way down the hill.

BYOBW isn’t always a spectator sport. If you have a front row location, you’d better be on guard. I learned this the hard way. As I was taking a picture of some racers coming around the corner, one of them smashed right into me and I went flying. A bonus of having the festival on Vermont Street is that San Francisco General Hospital is right around the corner.

As if the rain was not enough, some people try to sabotage racers by spraying them with silly string and dropping bananas on the street. A woman dressed in a pink rabbit costume appeared to be innocently spreading bubbles with a bubble machine, but her main goal was to distract the racers and slick up up the road even more with soap.

The race didn’t seem to be for time, it was more like a race to the end. At the end of each round, plastic tricycle parts were scattered about. Some people lost key parts of their vehicles and had to bow out, while others started to exit the race as it began to rain more heavily. As I began to start dripping with water and my umbrella couldn’t resist the urge to flip inside out, I decided it was time to head indoors. I can’t think of a better way I could’ve spent the afternoon, and it was completely worth getting soaked for.