A Racy Run

Maybe it’s the men in nuns’ habits. Or the women racers masquerading as human breasts, 5 feet tall, complete with nipple rings. Or the competitors pushing beer kegs in shopping carts. Or the gleeful runners waving huge model body parts on poles, alive thanks to the grace of organ donation.

Or maybe it’s the athletes in the altogether jiggling their chilly way along the city streets, through sun and wind, fog and sometimes rain, as residents hang out the windows of Victorian houses clutching Bloody Marys and throwing water balloons.

Or perhaps it is all of the above and--unbelievably--more that elevates what began almost 90 years ago as a simple footrace into this city’s biggest spectacle, the signature event in a place that loves a party and parties more than nearly any other city in America.

This is Bay to Breakers: an estimated 80,000 people running amok today in what racing enthusiasts say has become the country’s biggest and oldest continually presented footrace, which attracts both the fastest and the strangest athletes in the nation and offers an explicit lesson in all things San Francisco, from climate to terrain, history to politics.

The competition shuts down the city more completely than perhaps any of the 1,100 or so other events in this bastion of free speech--a city that celebrates everything from the Polish Spring Festival to the Exotic Erotic Halloween Ball, that hosts heads of state from around the world and welcomes the protesters that follow.

Bay to Breakers is “the world’s largest participatory athletic event,” says Mike Marinacci, who has run the race twice in just shoes, socks and hat as part of the unofficial Bare to Breakers contingent. “There’s a democratic aspect to it. You have the top runners, who do it as a race, and everyone else doing it as a giant, moving street party. It’s a Mardi Gras for jocks . . . the ultimate street festival.”

But it didn’t start out that way. In 1912, when this earthquake-shattered city was struggling to rebuild, the first Cross City race was held on New Year’s morning in an effort to boost sagging civic spirits.

Billed as the “largest sporting event in the West” by its sponsor, the now-defunct San Francisco Bulletin, the race was won by a part-time newspaper copy boy who credited his victory to an arduous training schedule and his mother’s cooking. Only 121 runners took part.

Five more runners competed in the second Cross City race. But over the next half century the field shrank to fewer than 100 athletes. In 1963 the race’s name was changed to the more descriptive Bay to Breakers, reflecting a course that bisects the San Francisco peninsula from the bay to the Pacific Ocean. The San Francisco Examiner became the sponsor in 1966, and the race began to make a comeback.

Feinstein’s Resolution

When the number of runners passed 10,000 in 1978, the naysayers came out in full force. Such turmoil! Such danger! So many people! Then-Supervisor Dianne Feinstein demanded in a resolution that race procedures be examined.

“The event is so out of control it is just luck you don’t have a trampling,” she said at the time. Her resolution was quietly vetoed, and participation has since risen nearly tenfold.

The big question, of course, is why? Why this? Why here?

Well, why not?

In San Francisco, everyone gets a celebration, a demonstration, a parade, a festival. The Convention and Visitors Bureau lists 120 of them each year--one every three days. The Police Department actually counts some sort of special event about every 7 1/2 hours, 1,100 all told in 1997.

There are peace marches and Italian Heritage Day celebrations, street fairs for the leather sex community, appreciation day for the cable cars. The Dyke March is followed a day later by the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Celebration and Parade. Revelers celebrate everything from chocolate and beer to orchids and tulips, and fete the various cultures of Russia, Mexico, China, Japan, Korea, Ireland and all of Latin America.

“It’s a very participatory city, I think, and it’s also very neighborhood-oriented,” says Lt. Don Carlson, who heads the Special Events Management Planning Unit for the Police Department and has been in charge of Bay to Breakers logistics for the last five years.

Race’s Toll on City

If you look at which San Francisco event takes the greatest toll on everyday life here, Bay to Breakers wins hands down. “No question,” Carlson says. The race wends its wacky way through five of the city’s 10 police districts, effectively cutting off the southern half of the city from the northern tip, San Francisco International Airport from Marin County, for the better part of Sunday.

“It shuts the city down, except for the downtown area,” Carlson says. And who would want to be downtown on race day, in the staging area for some 80,000 runners in various stages of dress, over-dress and undress?

While Bay to Breakers is not the only costumed race or competition run by naked athletes, race experts say it is probably the nation’s first and biggest in both categories. The first costumed runner appeared here in 1940, when a man described by one local paper as “a quaint old character” dressed up as Captain Kidd--cutlass and all--and came in flat last.

The winner that year was Ed Preston, age 23 and a third-time victor. Preston ran the race for the first time in 1935; he was 17, there were only 49 finishers and he won the second-place trophy. He ran for the last time with his grandson about a decade ago.

“When I ran that time, there must have been 100,000,” says Preston, a retired San Francisco police officer, now 81, and storing his trophies somewhere in his garage. “They weren’t runners. They were horsing around, holding hands together and parasols. It was a different thing.”

The Bay to Breakers only gets more different as the years go by. Elvis impersonators have braved the 7.46-mile course with its single killer hill, along with human condoms, the pope, Jesus Christ (with cross), the infamous O.J. Simpson slow chase and the occasional running nose.

Costume judging along the course was instituted in 1992. Three years later a runner dressed as Hillary Rodham Clinton carrying Bill won top honors. The next year, Chris Davis won for his “Phantom of the Operator” outfit. He wore athletic shoes and an authentic “Phantom” costume and ran inside a 35-pound replica of a bright red London phone booth.

The first year he competed, says Davis, also known as Hulaman, “I was sprinting to the end, and a piece of pepperoni pizza beat me. I swore to get revenge.”

He has since run as a Porta Potti, and as a line of hula dancers (with full-sized inflatable dolls in grass skirts attached to his pelvis, fore and aft). Last year, he was a giant saguaro cactus adorned with cowboy hat and bandanna.

And this year? Hulaman is mum on the details, but his costume weighs 25 pounds, he practices running with a weighted backpack, and he’ll have a heck of a time flying it from his Tucson home, let alone running in it.

Centipede Runners

If individual costumes were not enough, in 1978 the race added a special category of runners called centipedes--teams made up of 13 adults or six children connected by a costume up to 60 feet long, sporting antennae and a stinger.

The only real centipede restriction is one of taste, for this is, after all, a city that prides itself on its sense of style. “Since this is a San Francisco race,” official race regulations explain, “the judges would appreciate if teams would refrain from using polyester fabric.”

But the fun and games are not all fun and games. Audrey Cook, 43, was a centipede team captain last year, running along with nearly a score of other organ recipients. Cook has suffered from diabetes since she was 11 and received a new pancreas and kidney 3 1/2 years ago from a woman whose picture she now keeps in her living room.

“This is my sixth Bay to Breakers,” Cook says. “I did it on dialysis. I did it while the kidneys were failing. I did it post-transplant and continue to do it now. It becomes an annual goal to feel healthier and do it better.”

This year, the adult transplant centipede will run alongside a centipede of children who have received organs.

Bay to Breakers “gives us an opportunity to convey the message that organ and tissue donation is a worthwhile thing,” Cook says. “Look what it’s done for us. It’s saved our lives, changed our lives. . . . It’s given us health. I celebrate every day.”

Although the centipedes were officially welcomed two decades ago, the first naked runner shouldered his way in during Bay to Breakers ’83. Ed Van Sicklin, Naked Guy No. 1, describes the race as “more like just scampering around naked. It certainly drops the years off you.”

By 1992, Van Sicklin was advertising for company. These days 20 to 40 naked runners ply the San Francisco streets each May. Van Sicklin, 51, figures that another four or five “spontaneously disrobe” along the way.

San Francisco police, however, would prefer that runners be appropriately attired. Lt. Carlson notes that it is “positively illegal” to run without clothing. The sheer size of the race, however, is on the naked runners’ side.

“There are times when the mass of humanity is so large you can’t tell if people have clothes or not,” Carlson says.

Weather, however, is a hardier foe for the unclothed, and not just because it is often chilly in San Francisco in May. The way that it is chilly here sets this city apart.

San Francisco is a city of microclimates, weather that can range on the very same day from balmy in the Mission district’s so-called Banana Belt to windy in the financial district to socked in with fog in Golden Gate Park.

The Bay to Breakers starts in the pleasant but breezy financial district, heads up the Hayes Street hill to a transition zone between sun and fog and ends up at the ocean edge of Golden Gate Park, where the fog often does not clear.

Last year, says Monteverdi, “the temperature went from the 80s at the beginning to the high 40s at the end. The president of my running club was hypothermic at the end.”

Because the serious runners are segregated from the madness by several thousand volunteers linking arms, the winner has usually crossed the finish line before most of the costumed joggers are out of the gate.

“Everybody loves it,” says Somers Smith, an Olympic marathoner who will run again this year. “It’s probably the most popular race in the world. Everyone can get something out of it--serious runners and people who want to annoy everyone else.”

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Bay to Breakers

BY THE NUMBERS

First year: 1912, as the Cross City Race

Oldest runner ever: 95

Youngest registered runner: 1

Distance: 7.46 miles

Course record, men: 1993, Ismael Kirui, Kenya, 33:42

Course record, women: 1995, Delillah Asiago, Kenya, 38:23

1997 centipede winner: tie between organ donors and group costumed as dead members of the Heaven’s Gate cult.

Cost: More than $1 million a year, paid by San Francisco Examiner, event sponsor.

Good Works: Race raises more than $300,000 for Bay Area children’s charities.

Largest field: 1986, 110,000 participants, certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s largest road race.

Smallest field: 1963, a couple of dozen runners.

Unions: In 1995, Bill and Karma Denyer tied the knot next to Porta-potties at the race’s start.

Longest Running: Jack Kirk, now in his 90s, ran an estimated 60 times before quitting a decade ago.

Runner Up: Anthony Stratta, 67, has run 46 times since 1946 and is still going: “Now I know every 50th runner, and every 10th one knows me. I’m popular, but I never got that good.”

Source: Interviews, The San Francisco Examiner, the Internet, “The Human Race” by Len Wallach.