I finished in 58:16, a new record for me, and under an hour. I was 863rd in the race. Knocking 5 minutes off my time was a big achievement for me. I paced myself better, I think, in that I had nothing left at the end. But the big thing I did was to train at different speeds. That was hard but it made a difference.
The thing in the picture is an RFID tag that was used to track runners in Bay To Breakers 2007. There are many privacy concerns with RFID but this was the first time I have actually benefited from this technology. In this case I got an attractive plastic thing that looks a bit like a medal. It’s a bit bigger than a quarter (coin) and you are supposed to attach it to your shoes. Then as you run over special pads at the start and finish of the race, a computer can track your times. This helped me as I had a delayed start for similar reasons to 2005, but RFID meant that my time was only reckoned from when I actually crossed the start line. My time this year was 1:03:38, faster than last year (probably because of the more accurate timing) but still annoyingly over the hour. I finished in 1634th place which was down from last year.
The RFID system used was made by ChampionChip from Nijmegen in The Netherlands, using technology manufactured by TI. You can read about the mats and controllers, and the RFID chips themselves.
Some cute pictures that have been sitting in blogger for nearly a year. The race is on Sunday so I'm publishing this.
This year my time in Bay to Breakers was 1:06:57 and I placed 1474th. This is better than last year (1:22:00, 6150th) but that is partly because last year I had to stop to use a portaloo. I would like to be able to do it under an hour, after all, would you want to live in a city where the Mayor is faster than you?
The only bad thing about trying to run as fast as possible is that I didn't see as many of the costumes this year. I did see the Salmon (who I love). And I did see this porcupine (?)
There seemed to be fewer bands and soundsystems this year. Most of them seem to play classic rock and funk which goes well with running.
Frank Chu was there of course.
As well as someone in costume as Frank Chu:
There are some quite elaborate constructions:
As it is San Francisco there were some political jokes, like this:
and this:
Quite a nice set of pictures here.
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