Neurarunners do Bay to Breakers

After somehow going over seven years in the San Francisco Bay Area without once doing Bay to Breakers, I've done a total about-face and, just one year after my first run, captained my very own team this year. After sparkling my way through last year's adventure as the neuron rep in a team of microbes, I knew I had to bring this nonsense to the Neuralink run club. A year later, the raccoon/wizards team gave a fabulous nod to OG Neuralink lore, both to our history early days as a raccoon farm and to Tim Urban's Wait But Why article that first introduced our technological ambitions to the world, describing it as a "wizard hat."

The Neurarunners repped as raccoons and/or wizards

We were a solid crew of Bay to Breakers newbies, my whole single prior run somehow making me an expert. After a chaotic morning assembly around the Ferry Building (but honestly, are you doing Bay to Breakers right if it's any less than chaotic?), we gathered, tossed pitas, revelled in the collective surprises from the creativity of various costumes (or lack thereof), and then scattered as soon as we crossed the starting line. (I'm not sure the whole team got the memo that Bay to Breakers isn't to be run for time.) I tagged along with the speed demons until the top of Hayes Hill, only to lose sight of their sparkling capes when I paused for a congratulatory selfie. After a mile or two of solo running, I salmon'ed my way back upstream until I caught the mid-speed runners, Amanda and (non-Neuralink honorary team member) Israel, whose team I'd joined last year for my first stab at the event. We jogged and laughed and danced our way through the latter half of the course at a much more reasonable speed, though I still somehow entirely missed the human car washes. We crossed the finish line hand-in-hand, earned ourselves some comically green bananas, and finally whittled our group down to the final four who made it out for beers and Chicago deep dish in Hayes Valley before I frantically made a mad (and unplanned) dash back over the Bay Bridge to grab my forgotten suitcase before speeding back through the city towards SFO and another week down in Austin. The Neuralink fun never ends.

The raccoons and/or wizards of Neuralink did Bay to Breakers in sparkling style.

Here's to Neuralink's first (and perhaps not last) appearance at this San Francisco classic.