Fun on the Run : Hash House Harriers Take Beer-Drinking, Antics in Stride

Whatever else it was--and, at first glance, that was far from clear--it was quite a spectacle. Not to mention that it may well have been the first time that 100 people ran through the Santa Fe Depot not trying to catch a train.

As the pack sprinted through the downtown San Diego station early last Friday evening, one did not have to be an Amtrak supervisor to realize that these probably were not passengers hustling to make the 6:45 to Los Angeles. Dressed in brightly colored running garb, topped off by, in some cases, purposely ridiculous caps, the group punctuated its passage through the terminal by blowing whistles and bugles and frequently shouting: “On! On!”

The exhortation was not a boarding call.

Welcome to Their World

Though they did not realize it then, a few dozen startled Amtrak passengers had just been abruptly introduced to the zany, madcap world of the Hash House Harriers, an international beer-drinking and running society (and the order of that two-part description is critical!), whose members adhere to the maxim that it’s not whether you win, it’s how you play the game.

For the past week, San Diego has been host to “Americas’ Interhash 1989,” a gathering of nearly 800 “hashers” from around the world--some from as far away as Egypt and Australia--for what is essentially a nonstop party masquerading as a quasi-sporting event. If you put Nikes on the frat brothers in “Animal House,” you’d begin to get a rough idea of what hashing is all about.

A version of the old English game of hares and hounds, hashing combines elements of jogging, steeplechase, fox hunting, cross-country running and children’s secret-code societies into a hybrid in which competition is discouraged and beer-drinking and irreverence are heartily endorsed. In typical hash fashion, one way competition is discouraged is through more beer consumption--a form of punishment most hashers gladly embrace.

“We are running beer-drinkers, not to be confused with beer-drinking runners,” said Nancy Davis, the Grand Mistress of an Orlando, Fla., hash club. “We’ve got our priorities in order.”

Over a single hash course, the runners often find themselves traversing city streets, crisscrossing parks, climbing canyons and occasionally crossing water--sometimes with a boat, as often as not without.

Hashers are as likely to dash through shopping centers and office buildings as to break through wedding and funeral processions, as quick to pause for a mid-race beer break at a topless bar as they are to good-naturedly question the birthright of those runners who beat them to the cold beer and rather lewd revelry that await at the finish line.

“Compared to hashing, other running is pretty boring,” said Gary Albin, a Marine Corps officer and devoted Orange County hasher. “It’s a lot more interesting than running over the same 5 miles every day. The only thing predictable about a hash course is that it’s unpredictable.”

During the past four days of runs in San Diego and Orange counties, the whistle-tooting hashers and their recurring shouts of “On! On!” have drawn bemused reactions from bystanders as they covered picturesque coastal routes, sprinted through underground parking lots and tunnels, and ran up and down steep stairways and canyons.

One group even climbed through a manhole and, guided by flashlights, ran about one mile underground in a sewer tunnel. Because of questions over the legality of that underground romp--and an abiding desire to do it again, regardless--the precise location is a closely guarded secret.

“Hashing, by its very nature, has no rules,” explained retired local Navy pilot Terry Ede, one of the major organizers of San Diego’s Interhash, an event held in odd-numbered years in North America and in exotic locales around the world--last year, in Bali--in even years. “And many hashers feel that the few rules there are are there to be broken. But that’s the spirit of hashing. The crazier, the better.”

Hashing was started in 1938 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, by A. S. Gispert, an Australian who, like a number of British Army officers stationed there, tended to overcelebrate on weekends--showing, in the process, a greater affinity for beer than athletics.

According to hashing lore, Gispert, after one particularly serious hangover, decided to run around the padang, the city’s large open park, to sweat off some of his excesses. Gispert persuaded some of his friends to join him, and the run quickly became a weekly Monday night fixture, ending at a Chinese pub called The Hash House, where--somewhat contradictory to the run’s initial purpose--the group always downed plenty of beer.

When the group tired of running the same course, the enterprising Hash House proprietor began following the pack through rubber plantations and the jungle with a truckload of beer. Thus, a name and a proud tradition were born. Today, there are about 750 loosely organized hash chapters throughout more than 100 countries, including nearly 100 in the United States--three of them in San Diego.

Hashers assiduously defend their sport’s brand of eccentricity as a respite from workaday pressures that enables otherwise rational adults to unwind through some barely structured irrationality and fun-loving camaraderie. Most hash clubs hold weekly runs-cum-parties, with Monday night remaining the preferred time.

“A lot of hashers are hard-driving, aggressive types who wear a suit and tie all week long and welcome this as a break from the routine,” said Peggy Wyman, a member of the San Diego Hash House Harriers, referred to in short as SDH3. Or, as former La Jolla Hash House Harrier Mike McPhaden once put it: “As a group, we’re irresponsible, dissolute reprobates who six days a week suffer under a businesslike facade and on the seventh, show our true colors.”

Flour Marks the Spot

A typical hash run covers a 5- to 7-mile course, preferably over relatively unfamiliar territory and a variety of terrains, laid out by two “hares” who are given a 15-minute head start and mark their trail about every 50 yards with splotches of flour, chalk or scraps of toilet paper.

Whenever a runner spots a “hash mark,” he blows two short blasts on his whistle or horn and shouts, “On! On!”--indicating to the pack that he has found the hares’ trail.

Critical to hashing’s eschewing of serious competition are the check marks, false trails and loops set by the hares, devilishly maddening features that serve to slow down fast runners and allow slower ones to catch up. In a well-designed run, casual joggers running at about a 10-minute-per-mile pace will finish with well-trained marathoners in about 1 to 1 1/2 hours. There is no prize for finishing first--except, Albin noted, “getting first crack at the beer.”

Confusion Is the Key

The checkpoints are designed for maximum confusion, often set in traffic intersections or other areas from which there may be as many as four possible directions to run. Because the next true hash mark is not visible from the checkpoint, runners have little choice but to play their hunches and take off in different directions. If a hasher runs about 100 yards without seeing another hash mark, he realizes that he has guessed wrong and must retrace his steps to the checkpoint to try again.

While the front-runners check whether they are on the right course, those behind them call out, “Are you?” to which the leaders bellow, “Checking!” When the trail is located, calls of “On! On!” and the bugles’ blare rally the pack back to the circuitous chase.

False trails or “back tracks,” meanwhile, can cover up to 300 yards. Coming upon the three short lines or “BT” chalk marking that symbolize them is an especially disturbing discovery in rough terrain--and one certain to send a shower of expletives raining down upon the hares, regardless of whether they are still within hearing distance.

The misdirection attendant to the checkpoints and false trails usually causes some hashers to end up running several miles longer than the official course. Hoping to make up for lost time, some laggards, seeing the pack traveling down a parallel path, occasionally decide to trim a few corners off the course--a tactic that, while encouraged, earns them a shouted “Dirty SCBs!” a cry of derision for those who take shortcuts.

Like those runners who finish first--an equally severe transgression of hashing’s rituals of non-competitive etiquette--the SCBs will be called upon to perform a requisite “Down-down” by chug-a-lugging a beer at the “On In,” the finish-line party. But, lest the 50 kegs of beer at Friday’s On In give anyone the wrong impression, hasher rules stress responsible drinking and permit non-drinkers to pour beverages over their heads.

Infrequently, some of the hounds catch the hares--a rarity certain to produce incessant ribbing and, of course, an extra “Down-down” for the embarrassed hares. Still, the embarrassment is considerably less in American hashing than it is in some other areas of the world, where being caught sometimes results in hares finishing the race sans running shorts.

Consistent with their desire to leave normal personal and professional concerns behind them for at least one night a week, hashers more commonly call each other by assigned nicknames than by their real names. Many of the nicknames are graphic profanities or sexual double-entendres that could bring a blush even at an over-the-line tournament, where bad taste in team names is the norm.

Among the printable names are offerings such as Space Condom, Dead Puppy, Dr. Who, Zipper Burn, Hot Lips, Deep Throat, Mighty Byte, Flop-Flop and Master Chugger.

The nicknames often stem from a hasher’s personal habits, as in the case of Marine officer Albin, aka Shokunashi--an appellation that he received while based in Okinawa in the early 1980s. Roughly translated, the Japanese word means “socially unemployed”--a term that Albin’s friends found apt because of his habit of joking that he was going to visit unemployed villagers whenever he would veer off from the pack to relieve himself during runs through the countryside.

Painful Experience

Floridian Davis, meanwhile, earned her nickname of “Slam Dunk” in an exceedingly unpleasant fashion by breaking her back after diving into the shallow end of a pool after one hash run several years ago. Given hashers’ raison d’etre , that injury--which kept Davis in a body cast for five months--raises an obvious question. The answer is: No, she was sober at the time.

Though that incident alone would seem sufficient to guarantee Davis an honored place in hashing annals, she added to her already legendary status in San Diego this week by proudly displaying an “On! On!” suntan “tattoo” on her derriere--the result of six weeks’ of tanning with cutouts of the words pasted in place. And who says hashers don’t train hard for these events?

Davis’ tale (pardon the homonymic humor) is only one of hundreds of anecdotes in hashing history replete with the elements of danger, daring, comedy and absurdity that are the sport’s most treasured commodities.

During Malaya’s communist-instigated uprising in the 1950s, for instance, a pack of hashers running through a rubber plantation in the rain at dusk came across a group of sleeping guerrillas--and quickly scattered to alert the police. A Seoul hasher once fell into a manure pit and almost drowned. Hashers frequently run through four-star hotel lobbies and high-brow shops--hoping, like streakers of the 1970s, to get in and out before security personnel know what’s happening.

Though undeniably an imaginative twist, San Diego’s sewer tunnel dash still was hard-pressed to match what one hasher described as “the bizarreness quotient” of another tunnel experience in the 1987 Interhash in Philadelphia.

Rendezvous in Train Tunnel

In that run, the hashers were drawn into a long, dark train tunnel where, by pre-arrangement, a locomotive with lights on was positioned at one end, with stereo speakers amplifying the sounds of a moving train--causing many runners to trip over one another trying to press against the walls.

Hashers’ stretching of trespass and other laws has occasionally led to minor difficulties with authorities, though no such problems were reported here over the past several days.

But two years ago in Orange County, sheriff’s deputies were not amused--though they let the incident pass with a stern warning--when some hashers opted to reach the finish line via a short swim through the Dana Point marina rather than running a mile around it. And last January in Monterey, police closed a downtown block for 90 minutes until hazardous material specialists determined that the white powder found on the sidewalk was simply hash-mark flour--a fact they were informed of through a hasher’s call to the county’s 911 emergency number.

Though hashing is still relatively unknown even within conventional running circles, it has attracted periodic attention from doctors and academics eager to analyze the appeal of such non-traditional events. In the eyes of some psychologists, involvement in alternative events--compounded by delighting in breaking even their loose rules--allows participants to project an independent, slightly rebellious image.

Psychologically Stuffy

Hashers do not dispute that psychological profile, but they also regard such talk as precisely the kind of academic stuffiness that needs to be loosened up with a few Down-Downs at the On In.

The hashers who attended the San Diego event were predominantly in their 30s and 40s, covering a range of professions. But San Diego’s own hash clubs include active members whose ages stretch from the teens to the 60s.

Hashing aficionados emphasize that demographic mix in making the point that, as La Jolla hasher Mary Anne Curray stressed: “We’re not crazy all the time!”

The La Jolla club, for instance, also gathers for social events away from the hash trails, as when they collectively attended the play “Les Miserables.”

“We all looked very presentable and behaved normally,” Curray said. “Of course . . . we didn’t recognize each other.”