In a city where people reserve space in their closets for costumes, it’s hard to imagine a time when one San Franciscan actually had to wear a disguise just to run in its yearly bay-to-ocean fun run. After all, Bay to Breakers participants are famous for putting on everything from regular running attire to outlandish costumes, and sometimes even nothing at all. 

But on March 10, 1940, that’s what was done by Barbara J. Burke, who posed as a man to participate.

The year prior, Barbara had met a keen runner named Edward Preston at the World’s Fair at Treasure Island. The two fell in love. Edward, already a two-time winner of the race, wanted his girlfriend to join him in the run, which was then called the Cross City Race. But there was one problem. 

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“At that time women were not allowed to run with men,” Edward’s son James Preston told SFGATE in an interview.

Running as a sport was also a lot more exclusive in the first half of the 20th century than the plethora of weekend runs all across the nation today would suggest. While participation in the race, which began in 1912, was free, you had to be registered with the Pacific Athletic Association as an amateur athlete to run. This attracted “only serious runners with intentions of racing to win,” as St Mary’s College of California kinesiology professor Claire M. Williams wrote in her chapter on Bay to Breakers in “San Francisco Bay Area Sports.” Professionals were completely banned from participating, as it was “believed they did so with impure motivations” — meaning prize money. 

Edward Preston winning his first Cross City Race, the precursor to the Bay to Breakers race, on his birthday on March 6, 1938, in San Francisco.

Edward was fast, amateur or not, and had had Olympic hopes (the 1940 games were canceled in late 1939 as World War II raged in Europe). He ran for the Olympic Club,........

© SFGate