Bay to Breakers 2014

Official race time: 1:22:45, which is faster than my 2011 time of 1:24:57, though not by as much as I was hoping--I'd been trying to take that 04:57 off my time and finish under 1:20:00, but given that I wasn't able to do much training for the past month, and my shoes are basically shot, I'm quite happy with my time. It was a lot of fun! Even more fun than 2011, I'd say; the weather was better, too, although the crush in mile 1 was much worse, but on the other hand my progress up the Hayes street hill was much, much better than last time. I was definitely slower in the second half than I could have been, so there's room for improvement. But this year I wound up keeping the guy wearing the cardboard costume (a cactus this time; in 2011 it was a birthday cake) in sight, so that's a victory. I registered on Halloween for $31.31, and I think I'll keep doing that in the future, because it is so fun, and the sponsorship this year was better than when Zazzle had it in 2011, for sure. 

But seriously, Bay to Breakers is so fun. There's something really great about it--the people cheering you on from the sidelines in costumes (and half-drunk at 9 in the morning), the people running in costumes (not so drunk anymore; they've cracked down on drunk running quite a lot). I wound up feeling that as long as San Francisco can have such public celebrations of its own weirdness, the city will not entirely lose its heart. I hope so, anyway. 

I'm still selling a bunch of genre and related books, if you're interested!