Mountain View Runners Finish in Top 100 of Bay to Breakers Sunday

Over 100 registered runners from Mountain View participated in the 100th Zazzle Bay to Breakers on Sunday. Of them, two scored in the top 100: Rinaldo Cis at 96th place (43:23) and Dale Taylor at 49th place (40:37).

Cis, who ran Bay to Breakers for the third time, also scored fourth place in the men’s 40-49 division. To prepare for the hilly San Franciscan race, he trained over the past year for five or six days a week, running up and down local hills.

“This was the most challenging race I’ve done,” said Cis, 41, a software engineer. “I was participating against many of the top runners from the Bay Area.”

There were a total of 43,414 runners in the 12 kilometer (7.5 mile) race, which begins at sea level at the Embarcadero, stretches uphill at about 2.5 miles for the Hayes Hill, and then drifts downhill until the finish line at the Great Highway. Fourteen runners from Mountain View placed in the top 1,000 runners, or the top .03 percent.

Cis, who’s originally from Italy but has been living in Mountain View for the past 10 years, participates in five to 10 races a year, most which are half-marathons. He placed in the 65th position in Bay to Breakers in 2009 with a speed of 44:13, yet this year marks his best time.

Bay to Breakers is the race he puts the most preparation into, he said, both due to the strenuous nature of the course and the outpouring of talented runners from around the world.

None of the other races Cis does parallel the fun nature of Bay to Breakers, where costume-clad and festive partygoers line the course. “The atmosphere is very special,” he said.