Growing up in Southern California, I remember a high level of concern my parents seemed to have about my exposure to streaking. In the same way a once-dormant disease can rise up and spread through a local population, our area was apparently experiencing an unexplained outbreak. As I understood it, sometimes when a man and a woman loved each other very, very much, they ran through a parking lot with their clothes off.
Or they would run into a park and meet up with other people who loved each other very, very much, who would tear off their pants and run naked through the town until the police made them stop. If I happened to be around when the streakers came, I was to quickly look away. The warning was given as seriously as those for any other childhood danger—never look at the sun, never pet a strange dog, never take candy from a stranger, and if naked adults ever run in your direction, cover your eyes, hold your breath, and wait for them to pass.
The idea of a grown-up running naked in the full sun was stunning, but the implication that witnessing such a thing might damage me in some way made it simultaneously repellent and tantalizing. Since stunning erotic danger was the stock of most every childhood obsession, I probably thought about naked runners more than most children. Playing in the front yard, I worried about them the way other kids might worry about meteor strikes, or rabid animals, or kidnappers. What were the chances at any moment that naked adults, so very, very much in love, might suddenly run past? How would I best minimize my exposure? And what about my younger sisters, who were playing next to me—would I rush to shield their eyes or sacrifice theirs in order to save my own?
Because life plays out in giant circles, it was probably inevitable that I would one day return to California to sort this out once and for all. So it was that I found myself registered for the 104th running of the ldquo;Just go for it, man,” he said. “Nobody cares—enjoy yourself!&rdquo 12K in San Francisco last May—a race established as a way to unify the city after the devastating earthquake of 1906, but that unifies its people today in more varied ways. Of the many things setting ldquo;Just go for it, man,” he said. “Nobody cares—enjoy yourself!&rdquo apart from every other race in the country, the most tantalizing and repellent (depending on your point of view) was that the course, I was told by several friends who had been there, would be liberally populated with naked runners.
I asked Chris Holmes, the race’s general manager, about this. “Nudity in parks and public places was allowed in San Francisco until sometime around 2012, after which time it was banned,” he said. “Several long-held events in the city were exempted from the ban. ldquo;Just go for it, man,” he said. “Nobody cares—enjoy yourself!&rdquo was one of them.”
I asked him what the ldquo;Just go for it, man,” he said. “Nobody cares—enjoy yourself!&rdquo official policy is on naked runners. “A valid race bib must be worn at all times,” he said. “And if a runner wears nothing else?” I asked.
“A valid race bib must be worn at all times,” he repeated.
So, the door was open. The healing could begin. To conquer a childhood fear of spiders, hold a spider. A childhood fear of heights? Climb ladders. A childhood fear of streakers?
“So you’ll do it in the buff,” my wife, Susan, said when I told her I would go. I asked her if she thought I should. “Is this a bucket-list thing?” she asked.
“If I had a bucket list? Not really.”
“Then you should probably wear clothes.”
Get Your Spot for the NYRR Brooklyn Half.
“No one will know me there,” I said. “And I wouldn’t be the only one. If I’m ever going to do it, this would be the time.” It’s hard to pass up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, even when the opportunity is one that you never wished for. If someone told you to pet the lion and you had no interest but knew that you would never get another chance, you would probably pet the lion.
There in the hotel room on the morning of the race, I examined my options. On the bed were sensible running clothes. Hanging in the closet was a suit and tie I’d brought in case I felt like running the opposite of naked. And in the full-length mirror between those choices was the birthday suit we all wear to every board meeting and party.
I deliberated right up to the moment I left the room. In the end, there was never really a choice. The naked run, although a long-shot, may have been within the distant realm of possibility. What was not possible was the naked elevator ride, the naked walk through the lobby, the naked cab ride to the starting line, and after the race, the long naked bus ride back. Even without those impediments, as thoroughly as I searched my heart, I was just not very, very much in love with anything enough to justify a 12K streak, even in San Francisco.
The wisdom of that discretion became evident even before the race began. Nearly 50,000 of us waited in nine corrals for the starting gun to fire. Directly in front of me were a half-dozen girls dressed like Victoria’s Secret runway angels in lingerie, white feathered wings, and running shoes. I was never more grateful for clothing. I imagine it’s more fun to laugh it up with runway angels than to have to grin and bear their collective ick-face. And within the context of the enormous crowd, nudity would have been the least imaginative demonstration of outrageousness. According to official race lore, the first costumed runner at ldquo;Just go for it, man,” he said. “Nobody cares—enjoy yourself!&rdquo was a man who showed up in 1940 dressed as the comic book character Captain Kidd. He finished in last place. But what he started has grown into a spectacle that even includes 13-plus runners tethered together in a Centipede Division.
To my left was a large school of full-suited land sharks, hopping in place, and dropping their jaws over the heads of the runners around them. A woman dressed like Groucho Marx bobbed big, fake eyebrows and repeatedly slapped the rear end of a guy dressed like Marilyn Monroe. A guy and a girl reapplied lipstick and made final adjustments to their giant, pointy Madonna bras. Another guy tightened his diaper. There were plenty of typically dressed runners but almost just as many clowns, gorillas, superheroes, fruits, robots, bearded ladies, hula dancers, Wizard of Oz Dorothys, disco dancing, tie-dyed, sequined, pajamaed, fur-lined, tiger-striped, polka-dotted, neon-colored-wig-wearing beautiful people as far as you could see.
As the beginning of the race grew near, thumping music and shouts from the starting line DJ blurred and echoed against the walls of tall buildings surrounding us. Without warning or explanation of any kind, tortillas began to fly through the air—thousands of them launched from every direction, arcing high into the sky and cutting sharp angles on their descent. One smacked the back of my head. I turned to see where it came from as another flopped against the side of my face. “What’s the deal with the flying tortillas?” I shouted at a guy bouncing to the music—a giant doughnut with white fabric frosting and metallic rainbow sprinkles who was frantically grabbing them out of the air and didn’t hear me. One clipped my ear. Another dive-bombed into my forehead and fell to my chest. I trapped it and flung it out between two fingers like a ninja star. It flew low and fast past a group of people in rubber horse heads and silver body suits, then banked sharply into a crowd of shirtless muscle men in suspenders and rainbow tutus.
The tortillas disappeared as suddenly as they had appeared, and the crowd grew still. Runners removed their ball caps, cowboy hats, pith helmets, ruby crowns, and rabbit ears; they pulled back ninja scarves, goat masks, scuba masks, beekeeper veils, wedding veils, and listened reverently as the national anthem played over loudspeakers. A mighty roar rose with the end of the song—as much howl and bleat as straight-up cheer—the gun went off, and we surged toward the start.
Soon we were running, and I found myself sandwiched between a man and a woman wearing coconut-cup bras. As I snuck a glance at the guy, he shouted something that sounded like, “Stop staring and start knocking,” and thrust his coconuts toward me. I gave them a furtive, self-conscious tap—the only way to knock another man’s coconuts—and said “Thank you,” again, so glad I was wearing clothes. By mile one, I hadn’t seen any naked people, though there were expressions of lewdness more ambitious than simple nudity—a conventional-looking couple in matching black shirts with silk-screened writing on the back. His said, “Morning Wood.” Hers, “Spread Eagle.” There was a fit group of circa-1975, shirtless tennis guys with wood rackets, headbands, and tight, yellow terry-cloth shorts with tennis balls stuffed in all the right places and lots of exaggerated readjusting. About a half-dozen girls in sloppy makeup wore bathrobes, torn nylons, curlers, and little else. Every white-tight princess was a guy—the Hooters girls were guys, as was every scantily clad Little Red Riding Hood, Little Mermaid, Rapunzel, Snow White, and Glinda the Good Witch.
By the time I’d plowed into the middle of the race, it seemed as if most spectators were registered participants. Every block hummed with music. Runners stopped to dance. Dancers stopped to run. Only race bibs distinguished costumed runners from costumed bystanders. A crowd of people who appeared to be wearing only silver spray-paint did robot dance moves to Devo music in front of a brownstone completely covered to the third floor in tinfoil. Basketball players launched balls over the heads of runners into baskets on the opposite side of the street. Football players ran against the flow, firing passes to oncoming runners who threw them back. A guy with a sign around his neck reading “Bust a Move” stood in the middle of the course in front of a huge sound system blasting Michael Jackson music.
There was drinking—a runner dressed as a half-barrel somehow dispensing beer from a tap into the cups of those following him; another guy dressed as a small wooden bar with brass rails and red velvet trim, pouring Bloody Marys into plastic shot glasses for anyone who wanted one. Soon, many had begun to walk or had stopped completely, trading the run for any of the multitude of parties flowing into the street from either side—a phenomenon that explained the porta-potty stations along much of the entire course. By this time I had given up on the idea that I would encounter a mob of streakers but still held to the hope that I might at least see, oh, a couple of used-car salesmen out for a wild time, or maybe some department store managers on an extreme team-building exercise. Then while dodging stopped traffic in an attempt to stay within the narrowing flow of racers, I spied the prize ahead—a man wearing nothing but a small purse with attached race bib slung across his shoulder—the ultimate costume: no costume at all. A full-body tan indicated this was not the first time he had been naked in public. Shattering one of the last taboos of my childhood, I accelerated toward him.
“Hey, buddy!” I shouted when I caught up. “What’s it like to run naked?”
“Try it!” he said.
“I don’t have the guts—”
“The balls,” he said, cutting me off, and we both laughed. I fought the compulsion to glance down.
“Just go for it, man,” he said. “Nobody cares—enjoy yourself!”
For a split second, I considered it. The guy was right—no one would care. Hop-scotching around the parties had already trashed my time. I could stop and drop it all and finally begin that bucket list with the first item crossed off. You can’t plan for something like this ahead of time—you don’t know how you’ll react until you’re there. This wasn’t just any race—I wasn’t just running next to any naked stranger, I had been thrust into a moment of deep personal discovery, and in that moment, what I discovered was: I don’t want to run naked ever—even if it’s allowed, even if everyone is doing it, even if nobody cares. I’m uptight. I long ago left California for the East. I look good in a shirt and jeans. I don’t rodeo. I don’t git along little doggie. I don’t get the joke. I like peanut butter and jelly. I don’t dingle-dangle. I probably should, but what I discovered in that moment is that I probably never will.
I darted ahead of the naked man and never looked back. Later on, I caught up with several other naked groups, and perhaps since I’d definitively decided not to join their ranks, my view of them had grown more objective. Approaching naked running men and women of a certain age from behind is funny only if you don’t look too long or too closely. And while it may be fine to watch them pass from the sidelines, it’s another thing to have to speed up or fall back in order to avoid an extended and convincing argument that God made compression fabric for a good reason.
In the last two and a half miles, the course shot through Golden Gate Park before dumping into the finish at the “breakers” of the Pacific Ocean. By this point, most of the spectators and the more elaborately costumed runners had peeled off, leaving more room for runners looking to clock faster miles. There were exceptions—bees chasing flowers, a Pac-Man chasing little dots, pilots chasing flight attendants who rolled luggage behind them, doctors chasing nurses, jailers chasing a prisoner, brides chasing a groom, and best of all, a group of hospital attendants chasing a guy who was securely tied into a straight-jacket.
It’s funny only if you don’t look closely. God made compression fabric for a reason.
I rolled through the finish, ducked into a medal, and walked with the flow to a large stage at the edge of the beach, where a man was leading an all-meow rendition of the San Francisco Giants’ unofficial anthem, “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Instead of “Just a small town girl…” the giant crowd raised their arms and sang, “Meow meow meow meow meooow…”
Drinking a beer while taking in the spectacle, I wondered about the possibility that every large race would eventually be like ldquo;Just go for it, man,” he said. “Nobody cares—enjoy yourself!&rdquo, if they last that long. Does more than 100 years of topping the previous event mean the funny hat and glasses at year 10 will inevitably become the pink gorilla super-heroes by year 104?
When people refer to an adult as someone who never grew up, it’s always meant as a bad thing—the person never buckled into a career, never committed to a real relationship, never stopped eating candy for breakfast. But I had just spent the morning with 50,000 people who never grew up in the best possible way. As uninteresting as a slow ambling group of costumed and half-naked adults might be—that same free-wheeling spirit coupled with the fitness of a brisk 12K run seemed the perfect blend of two worlds.
“Did you meow?” my youngest son asked when I returned home—the kind of question a kid asks his parent as a means to measure himself by. Are we meowers or are we not meowers? That’s all he really wanted to know. (Not my time, which was 1:15:43, for those keeping tabs.) I had just told him I hadn’t run naked even though I could have and no one would have cared. Now when a teacher asked him to share something about his family, he could say, “Well, we’re not streakers.” I told him that I meowed. I said I meowed every verse, which was more than he wanted to hear. He smiled politely. The truth isn’t always easy, but it’s always the truth. In this family, we don’t rodeo and we don’t run naked, but when we’re in San Francisco and the whole crowd is doing it and it’s a Journey song, then yes, kid, we meow until we’re hoarse—we’re not that uptight. Live with it.
