There’s ice on the banks of the Mississippi, a fact I might have put to good use if I’d noticed earlier. As it is, I’m halfway across—and neck-deep in—a backwater somewhere near Fort Snelling. I can only hope these are the last few steps of a run organized by the Minneapolis Hash House Harriers. The water is cold enough that I can’t help gasping, and my feet have quickly become two points of sharp pain trudging through the mud. As I emerge from the water on the other side, holding my shoes and socks above my head with one hand and a guide rope with the other, I reflect on how quickly I opted for a great deal of acute pain to avoid running a two-mile detour on dry land. In fact, I’ve spent much of my life avoiding running. This is the first time I’ve ever been tempted to take part in a group running activity, and the main attraction was the Hash House Harriers’ motto of being “a drinking club with a running problem.” I figured I hate running, but I like drinking beer, so somewhere on the running-drinking continuum I might find fitness.
My adventure with the club began about two hours earlier, in the parking lot of a St. Paul shopping mall. Twenty of us running drinkers (or, in some cases I suppose, drinking runners) circled up and received a chalk-talk on the basics of hashing. In today’s “hash,” two “hares” started out 15 minutes ahead, marking a trail by bouncing a tennis ball covered in flour, and marking intersections with chalk.
The traditions and vocabulary of the hash have their roots in “hounds and hares,” the English version of hide-and-seek. In 1938, a group of British expatriates in Kuala Lumpur re-created the children’s game with adult refreshments, and there are now more than 1,500 clubs worldwide dedicated to the activity. Along the way, hashers have developed their own traditions, including the use of embarrassing or vulgar nicknames for each other, such as “Balls of Ice,” “Dogbreath,” or “Mr. Ed.” Many people who have hashed together for years do not know each other’s real names.
Once the hares ran off, the rest of us stood around swapping off-color jokes, and a couple of people showed their obsessive commitment to cardiovascular health by smoking cigarettes. Indeed, although a few of the “hashers” had the thin, gazelle-like bearing of a serious runner, most of us would easily fit into what the running world delicately calls the “Clydesdale” category. My dream of the hasher lifestyle as an effective weight-control method seemed optimistic.
And then we were off… on a slow jog, then a walk, then a stop, a double-back, then a walk, then a scramble down a hill, and so on. To keep the run interesting, the hares mark numerous paths, some of which end up being false trails. The faster runners sprinted ahead to scout the prospective paths, while the rest of us milled around in a generally forward-moving direction, waiting to hear which was the “true path.” In fact, the hardest running segment of the day was a jog up the riverbank to a promised martini stop. Unfortunately, the hooch was all gone, which spoiled the mood considerably.
After an hour and a half, up and down the riverbank and over a highway, six of us arrived at the river crossing. Luckily, the submarine experience was followed quickly by a fire in a warming hut, cold beer, and the bag of dry clothes we had been warned to bring along. “Second Base,” a happy-go-lucky nurse from Minneapolis, told me that previous outings have taken them through swamps and multiple river and stream crossings. “I still have marks on my legs from running through the forest last August!” she said. Two of her friends who accompanied her on their first hash were notably unimpressed by the experience. “I thought I’d have time to go shopping this afternoon!” sniffed one.
“Sucks,” a tall real estate assessor from a hashing club in Milwaukee, took another view. “It’s a good way to meet people, it gets you outside, you get to drink, and the chicks get naked,” he confided.
At the post-run soiree in a Richfield basement, the party mood was odd—a weird cross of women’s rugby, Dungeons and Dragons, and “Girls Gone Wild.” While the group was holding its traditional post-run circle to “down the hare”—basically making the trail-setters drink—a couple of women visiting from the Milwaukee club actually took off their tops, while yelling drinking songs at the top of their lungs. In the end, I left neither drunk nor sold on the hashing lifestyle. But I have to agree with another hasher, who said, “It’s a good way to kill an afternoon!”—Dan Gilchrist
Leave a Reply Cancel reply