Not Your Conventional Running Club Hashers flaunting their Red Dress attire in New Orleans
By Dakota Parks
Knee-high socks, plaid kilt skirts, vests covered in patches, handmade necklaces that double as name tags, and beers in hand: this is what a pre-lube looks like with the running group, the Hash House Harriers. The pre-lube is just the start of the debauchery— the warm-up before the run. The Hash House Harriers were formed nearly 80 years ago in prewar Malaysia by a group of British colonial officers looking for a way to run off their hangovers, promote physical fitness, quench their thirst for beer, and keep their older members feeling young. Now, hashing, as it is called by members, has thousands of chapters, or kennels, stretching across all seven continents. 10 | DOWNTOWNCROWD.COM
Downtown Crowd sent me out to get the scoop first-hand by going on trail with the local hashers. Despite running with a torn ligament in my knee, I was met with an outflux of support as members even stopped to help me hurdle a lowlying wire fence. What I did not expect to discover in this group was a tight knit family that spans coast to coast, worldwide. The local kennels in Pensacola are Survivor H3 and East Hill H3, while Siete Cerveza H3 and Emerald Coast H3 are based out of Fort Walton. “Hashing is a combination of two different things. It’s a British game, ‘Hare and Hounds,’ and that’s the reverse tag game where the hare is hiding and you have to find them. Then, there’s the Malaysian side of it: ‘paper chase,’ where one person
goes out and creates a running trail with little bits of paper or toilet paper and the others have to find them. They’ve basically combined the two of those games into what is now known as hashing,” said “One Two” age 26 from Siete Cerveza and Emerald Coast. At every trail, a hare leads the way leaving clues like chalk marks or dashes of flour along the trail for the group of hounds, or runners to find. However, it’s not as simple as a game of tag or even a scavenger hunt—there are false trails, backchecks, song checks, mid-run beer checks and most importantly: the hare always lies. Trails can vary in complexity, length, and terrain. Survivor H3, for example, loves a “shiggy trail,” the rough terrain with mud, briars, and unkempt trails.
“Length of the trail depends if it’s in the shiggy, a pavement pounder, a pub crawl, or a ball buster (half marathon). As a general courtesy, they will let you know ahead of time if it’s going to be a long trail. That’s part of the inclusivity of hashing: no one gets left behind. Survivor has trails between 3 and 5 miles, but the average trail is about 2.5 miles,” said “Poppins” age 50 from Survivor. Traveling is a big part of hashing. Members travel across the globe to meet new people and hash with new kennels. Social media has made it even easier to meet new hashers and kennels. “I’ve hashed in Germany, Brussels, Korea, Okinawa, Florida, New Orleans, Mississippi, Alabama, Geor-