I Saved a Race

Newsletter 2023-08-27

Every August, the running club in my hometown in Illinois throws an event called the Hash. In its purest form, it's a nonlinear fun run/obstacle course where participants complete challenges at various stations spread miles apart. In practice, it’s five hours of day drinking in a park. Runners divide into teams and tackle the stations in any order and by any route. Last year, our various shortcuts led to one person getting a snakebite and another having a tree fall on their head. Clearly, it doesn’t pay to abandon the main trails, but those are long and winding. Our group will risk death and disfigurement if it saves us a few steps. Once we actually made it to the stations, the challenges were complex. They could involve paddle boating, kayaking, or pushing each other in wheelchairs. That last one was especially convenient given all the falling trees and snakebites. At its peak, the Hash had a dozen stations and nearly a hundred runners. Last year, there were three stations and maybe two dozen people. This year, the race director warned us that if twenty-five people didn’t sign up, the entire event would be scratched. The Hash is one of my favorite days of the year. I had to act.

I immediately reached out to my normal crew. I have an entire cast of friends who I only see once a year at this particular event. We have a reputation as the funnest team because we drink the most and run the least. That reputation begins and ends within our group because no one else remembers we exist. Some people still mistakenly believe that this running event hosted by a running club should involve actual running, and it shows. We tend to take in stragglers who arrive without a premade group of their own, then corrupt them to our ways. That’s how I first met the Deacon nearly a decade ago. He was a volunteer clergy member of some uptight church he didn’t even want to be a part of until he was kicked out because his wife filed for divorce. I made fun of him for that story relentlessly the first time he told it. He’s been on my Hash team every year since. He lives half an hour from me in a different Indianapolis suburb, but we only ever encounter each other across the border in Illinois at this event. There are other recurring characters. There’s Runner Woman who insists on running even though she’s now a core member of the most adamantly anti-running team. She runs, we swear at her (lovingly, of course), and she stops. Rinse and repeat for the entire day. There’s also the 911 dispatcher with all the crazy stories she probably shouldn’t tell us about her work plus her husband who was last year’s falling tree victim. He was fine since it was only a glancing blow and he was protected by the healing power of alcohol. Then there’s Bryant, one of my few remaining friends from high school who still lives in our shared hometown. Our entire peer group of former competitive runners used to do these events together, but now we’re down to just me and him. Everyone else moved away or moved on. Quitters. Some of us refuse to grow up.

When I found out there was a chance the Hash might be canceled this year, I reached out on Facebook to my once-a-year friends to make sure they signed up. I even recruited new people. I enlisted one brother who had never run with us before and my local suburban friend who’s actually fast—after making him promise not to run, of course. We had eight people sign up in our group, which was nearly a third of the way to the necessary twenty-five person quota just on our own. Surely that would be enough.

It wasn’t. We got an email Tuesday night that the event for Saturday was canceled. It was like hearing that Christmas had been called off due to lack of popular interest. I simply couldn’t comprehend what better things people had to do than getting toasted in a park at 10 a.m.. Sadly, the running club has been dying for a while. The members who formed its backbone when I joined twenty-five years ago are now in their seventies and eighties. I’m half their age and my knees no longer work. It’s unrealistic to think they could keep going after destroying themselves with a lifetime of marathons and ultras. Ironically, the least healthy part of their combined running and drinking events was the running part. There wasn’t a new generation to replace them. I’m part of the problem. I moved away, just like nearly everyone I graduated with. There aren’t a lot of jobs over there, and no people means no new club members. It’s a shame someone didn’t revive the local economy in a decades-long scheme to let me drink in public one day a year.

Upon getting the cancellation email, my wife Lola naturally began plotting out all the productive things we could do with our weekend instead. I offered a much better idea, and by “better,” I mean far more irresponsible: Why not just have the Hash at our house? Lola agreed. She has a weakness for men with schemes. We don’t have space for an outdoor obstacle course, but we didn’t need it. We had a dining room table and all the alcohol I could fit in our beer fridge. That would be enough of a challenge. We also didn’t need all twenty-five people. We could invite our usual crew and shun all the losers who actually run. Violating a serious taboo, I invited my once-a-year friends over to my house. I was surprised to receive a lot of enthusiastic yeses. There wasn’t time to properly clean our humble dwelling to withstand public scrutiny, which was a blessing. Rather than spending two weeks trying to make our house look like it wasn’t inhabited by a tribe of unruly barbarians, we simply vacuumed and picked up for an hour. We’d have to hope the light beer did the rest to hide our crimes against cleanliness. In a final move, I invited over the race director who had been forced to cancel the Hash. We’re more once-a-year acquaintances than once-a-year friends, but it’s a huge sacrifice to organize these events, even when no one shows up. He agreed to come over, too, and even said he’d bring his daughter. We were adding new members to our small group. It was shaping up to be the best hash ever.

Then the cancellations started. Runner Woman said she couldn’t make it because her husband was in the ICU with bronchitis. I couldn’t throw the challenge flag since I’ve used surprise hospitalizations to skip half of my social engagements in the last year. The race director couldn’t come because he forgot his daughter had to take the SAT that morning. Bryant said he and his wife were going mountain biking instead. That one hurt. He chose wholesome, sober exercise with the person he loves over day drinking with me. I’m not sure our relationship can ever recover. Sometimes, once-a-year friends are just once-a-year friends. It was folly to try to convert them into come-over-to-my-house friends. Still, I soldiered on.

I refused to let the substitute Hash also be canceled. Fortunately, I had planned for failure. Anticipating a high rate of flakes, I had also invited over my usual board game friends, all of whom confirmed. I say that like it’s a huge number of people, but it’s four. A few of my non-running runner crew members also came through. The Deacon, my original once-a-year friend, agreed to make the drive over from his nearby suburb, and my local fast friend came, too, after reaffirming his promise not to actually run. I absolutely would have thrown him out if he started doing laps around our dining room table. Counting me and Lola, we ended up with eight adults, which, at our current ages, qualifies as a rager. Anything over what I can count on one hand is officially out of control.

To make the day a special event instead of a regular board game afternoon, I set up an overall scoring system. The winner of any game got three points, second place received two, and third place was awarded one. However, you also earned one point for every drink you finished. I ended the day with fifteen points, and my highest place in any game was third. If you’re my mom reading this, that means I came in third place fifteen games in a row and didn’t drink anything. When I got thirsty, I had water.

We had a taco bar for lunch and carryout pizza for dinner with entirely too many snacks in between. We played a murder mystery game where we got to launch wild accusations at each other, a picture game where we got to criticize each other’s artistic interpretations, and a block-stacking game where we got to test our agility and hand-eye coordination after fifteen third place finishes in a row. The highlight of the day was an experimental game mashup that might be the single greatest thing I’ve ever come up with. Telestrations is a drawing version of the game telephone. One person writes a word, the next one sketches it, and the person after that writes down what they think the drawing is. Play continues around the table until the picture gets warped beyond recognition. Things normally stay PG. The recommended word prompts are things like “volcano” and “school bus.” I had a better idea: What if we combined Telestrations with Cards Against Humanity? Those prompts are considerably less safe for work. In fact, they’re not safe for anywhere. They’re the kind of things that get you canceled from the internet and expelled from society. Those were our starting points. The best part is not all the cards were dirty, but everyone assumed the worst. Lola, for example, picked the prompt, “Mom.” She drew something completely upstanding and appropriate. Seven people later, the drawing was, shall we say, considerably less motherly. I’ve never laughed so hard in my life. I probably tore a few internal stitches. I hope my usual surgeon can get me in on Tuesday.

The day was a great reminder that I don’t need an official event in a public place to have fun. Running clubs may fade, but friends are forever. Except for all the once-a-year friends who bailed on the backup Hash, and Bryant, who picked a wholesome couples bike trip over a day of coming in third. He’s dead to me.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James