Sunday was definitely the day the crazies come out. I woke up at 2:30am (which is usually around when I go to sleep), and headed over to the Red Cross office in Oakland for the carpool. We crammed 7 people in a van designed for 6 and I drove us all over to San Francisco for First Aid volunteering at the Bay To Breakers. At the office, we had orientation, got our assignments, and, most importantly, got fed. My group and I got to our station at 6:00, so we setup and waited for the race to start.

The Bay to Breakers is a very interesting race, mostly because for the majority of people it's less of a race and more of a party. When I ran it a few years ago, I was in with the not-so-serious runners (but still runners), so I missed out on the whole party thing. This time, I got to see the mood of the race shift as people went by. First you've got the ultrafast runners flying by, then you've got a larger group of people running but knowing there's no way to catch the Kenyans in front, then you start to see more joggers, then walkers, then finally the largest group of all... the party.

The party was mostly college students from all over the country slowly jaunting towards the polo field. There was allegedly a no-drinking-and-no-nudity policy this year, but that certainly didn't stop anybody. Our first aid station was setup next to a 'Alcohol Check Point Ahead' sign which turned out to be a huge draw for drunken photography as well as generating its fair share of cuts and scrapes as drunken "runners" fell from its perch. There were some crazy, crazy groups. I saw people dressed up like the prince and his cousins in Katamari pushing a katamari ball made up of cardboard boxes enclosed in twine. There was one group dressed up like ancient greeks pulling a large Trojan Horse. And I can't begin to count how many portable bars people were pulling and pushing. All in all, it was pretty crazy. If I were a bit more awake and a bit more intoxicated, I'm sure it would've been an amazing time, but as it was, I was glad to get out of there.

I got back to the SF office at 2pm, and I had to wait until 4 for everyone to get back from the last stations, so we could drive home. I finally got in bed around 5pm, took a 2 hour nap, ate dinner, then went back to bed for 14 hours. And if you think that's bad, Emily (one of the other volunteers and was surely up before me) was driving volunteers to Burlingame and got a flat tire on 101. She was supposed to come back to SF and get a ride with us back to Oakland, but she told me to just leave and she'd get home another way... I hope she didn't get back too late...

All in all, tons of fun and much different from the marathons...