Bay to Breakers (99th ING) race in San Francisco
“It’s crazy,” Yvonne Milham of San Francisco said. “It’s San Francisco.”
The first and only time that she ran the Bay to Breakers race before, she was 15 years old. Today she ran the race pushing her four-year-old daughter in a stroller.
The Bay to Breakers race in San Francisco is two, two, two races in one! The 12-kilometer (7.46 mile) race from the Embarcadero to the Great Highway (photo above) is one of road racing’s top events and a fun run for tens of thousands of others.
The first race is a serious footrace among very fast contenders. Lineth Chepkurui, a 22-year-old Kenyan, broke her own record for the 12-kilometer run with a time of 38 minutes and 7 seconds. She also broke the five-year-old record of 38:22 for the race. Sammy Kitwara, a 23-year-old from Kenya, defended his 2009 Bay to Breakers crown by barely beating his fellow Kenyan Peter Kirui in a time of 34:15. The elite men and women runners were followed by more than 5,000 other serious runners.
The second race is what SFGate.com (home of the San Francisco Chronicle) calls “the 60,00-person party that followed.” There were cross-dressing ballerinas, half-dressed pirates, butterflies, harem girls, pharaohs. and Vikings with horned hats and plastic battle axes. There were only a handful of arrests, for public drunkenness, and a few minor injuries.
There was even a “Bay to Breakers in Wonderland” float! 
(Photo #19 below….)
The SFGate article has 94 images of the race today.
(Note added May 17, 2010: Make that 93 still images and a video….)
-Bill at
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