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From THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, 11 Oct 1989

FOLLOWING THE FLOUR IS A POPULAR SPORT FOR FOLKS ON THE RUN

A Schoolboy Game Grows Up and Takes Participants Through Glitz and Grime

By Hilary Stout

WASHINGTON -- Runners are storming Union Station, the capital's elegant boutique-lined train depot. Slim swift runners. Sweaty, wheezing, shouting runners.

Weaving around puzzled shoppers, brushing by perplexed commuters, loping past diners at a candle-lit cafe, they peer at the floor as they run, like hounds on the chase. Tiny blotches of flour, discreetly sprinkled on the polished marble floor, mark a secret trail.

"On, on!" cries one runner, spotting another white splotch. Someone at the front of the pack blares a toy horn.

And on they streak, out of the station doors into the autumn dusk, where they art into a busy traffic circle in search of the next dusting of flour. Horns honk. An angry motorist shouts. The mark is found.

"On, on!"

This is hashing -- a sport, of sorts.

Just Like Junior High
"A lot of us suffer from psychiatric disorders; mania, schizophrenia -- my kind of crowd," says Mark Gross, a bearded, shirtless 31-year-old businessman who has navigated the roughly five-mile trail.

Once a week lawyers, bankers, bureaucrats, diplomats, teachers, and otherwise respectable types take to the streets here in search of trails through the theater lobby of the Kennedy Center, for instance, or a drug-infested city park.

They are members of the Hash House Harriers, a boisterous and rapidly growing international running club that has airs of a secret society and an undisciplined junior-high class. "It's like a controlled craziness -- a sort of semi-controlled craziness," says Pam Semon of San Diego, who recently became so taken with "hashing" that she has decided to give up precious time with her daughter to hash every Friday night.

Hashing -- basically an excuse to run on a surprise-filled trail and finish with beer, food, and song -- has reached the U.S. after years overseas, mostly in the Far East. Based on the 18th century English schoolboy game called hares and hounds, hashing was dreamed up in the 1930's by two Englishmen and an Australian living in what is now Malaysia. The trio sought to shed a few pounds and shrug off a few hangovers by running around a Kuala Lumpur park.

Flour Power

But mere running was a little dull. So the trio decided to take turns laying trails -- littered with false leads -- through jungles and rice fields. After navigating the course, they rewarded themselves, rather to the detriment of their original purpose, with beer in their quarters next to a club nicknamed the Hash House. (As some hashers tell it, the club barred the sweaty runners because they didn't meet its dress code.) And the hash was born.

In the ensuing decades, hashing spread among international bankers, military personnel, diplomats, and others who tended to find themselves in places like Brunei with nothing to do. Now there are 80,000 hashers in more than 700 clubs in 126 countries on every continent except Antarctica.

In the U.S. hashing has grown from about 10 clubs in 1980 to 90 today in nearly every major city and scads of smaller communities, from Ozark, Mo., to Waukesha, Wis. A book by a Maine hasher will be published this fall. The title, "Half a Mind: Hashing, the Outrageous Running Sport," refers to the hasher's motto: If you have half a mind to join a hash, that's all you need."

Hashing, alas, has at times been misunderstood by the general public. Last year, residents of Boston's ritzy Beacon Hill neighborhood noticed some flour at the bases of a few lampposts and concluded it was poison, intended to kill their pets. "Mysterious Powder Turning Up On Sidewalks," the BOSTON GLOBE worried in a headline. A lab test by an animal protection group and a phone call from a hasher set the newspaper straight: The white powder was "only flour", as the newspaper later reported, "used for a running game."

Earlier this year the Monterey, Calif., fire department donned special masks, called in the county health department and roped off several downtown blocks for an hour and a half before determining that the white splotch was merely flour, a remnant of a run. (In early days of the sport, hashers used small pieces of paper to mark the trail, but that practice ran afoul of local litter laws as the sport spread to other cities. Flour was chosen because it is biodegradable. In snowy climes, the flour is tinted with food coloring.)

The Kremlin hasn't taken too kindly to the sport. The KGB several years ago detained an airline executive in the middle of a hash near Gorky Street. Shortly afterwards, the Soviet foreign ministry warned all embassies that "group jogging could lead to accidents with serious injury to people, and such activities interfere with the normal life of the city."

People do tend to get obsessive about it. Couples have hash weddings. People plan vacations around hashing. After Dave Fenimore of Washington, D.C., graduated from law school this spring, he took a trip around the world, hashing nearly every place he went, including Katmandu. "The highest hash in the world," he notes.

Some hashers hash to socialize. "It's a cheap date," says Melanie Campbell, a member of the San Diego hash. Others hash to make amusement out of running. "After a while, when you do a lot of running it's as boring as hell," says Luther Jones, a labor lawyer in Dallas.

Hashing may be arduous and raucous, but it isn't boring. Hash trails have taken runners through Sea World in San Diego, Neiman Marcus in Boston, Penn Station and Grand Central Station in New York, a supermarket in Winooski, Vt., National Airport in Washington, the neck-deep waters of a creek in Dallas and the lobby of almost any elegant urban hotel that comes to mind.

"You name it, we've been there," says Roark Herron, a deputy branch manager at Gulf International Bank in New York.

The hash broke new ground this summer at an event called the Americas Interhash 1989 in San Diego, at which participants were handed flashlights and sent down a manhole to slosh through a sewer for about a mile.

But the trail that will go down in hashing lore was at the 1987 Interhash, held in Philadelphia. Hashers get a dreamy gleam in their eyes when they tell that story.

The trail began at the Liberty Bell, then descended into the subway, where the trailsetters, or "hares," were passing out tokens, sending 600 hashers en masse aboard the train. At every stop, runners jumped out to check for a flour trail. After about a half-dozen stops one was sighted, leading the runners above ground, through the zoo and into a dark railroad tunnel.

Then they heard a train.

"People were screaming, 'Oh my God,'" recalls John Studach, who teaches at Georgetown Day School here. "Then we saw a locomotive. You couldn't tell if it was moving." The noise was coming from two loudspeakers.

Hashing is both a ritual and an anarchy. "The rules are: There are no rules," any hasher will proclaim. But some things are always the same.

For one: You cannot win. The ultimate hash trail would have so many false leads and checkpoints (X-marked spots where the trail pauses, sending runners off searching in every direction for the next mark) that everyone would finish at the same time. This is hard for some to comprehend. "It's tough to recruit hashers in New York," sighs Lee Carlson, a Manhattan tax lawyer who began hashing in the 1960's when he was studying in Singapore. "Yuppies are too competitive. They keep saying, 'How do you win?'"

Two: Hashing calls for beer. "I am a beer-drinker with a running problem," one hash lapel button reads. The beer is often imbibed through the ritual of the "down-down," inflicted on those who run too fast, those wearing new shoes, those new to hashing, and other assorted sinners, including a reporter writing an article on the hash. Sign of the times: Most hashes now permit soda, water, and non-alcoholic beer.

Three: Hashers speak their own language. "On, on," for example, both announces the after-run party and is a signal that the runners are on the right path. Hashers also address one another by nicknames customarily bestowed by the club leaders. "If you don't like your name," warns one hasher known as "Special Sauce," "they give you a worse one."

PART DASH, PART BASH

After a zany cross-country hash run, things usually come to a head--of foam

by Tom Dunkel

A HASH run. Hmmm. Sounds like a bit of weirdness dreamed up in Haight-Ashbury during the `60s. A few hippies were sitting around their pad eating funny brownies, and one space cowboy got hit by a cosmic lightning bolt: "Hey-y-y, like let's tie-dye our sneakers and run backward from the Golden Gate Bridge to that town in Minnesota where Dylan was born. Can you dig it?"

Hashing, actually, happens to be a strictly legal, nonpsychedelic athletic endeavor. Not that it can't take a toll on the brain. Think of the sport as part frat party, part connect-the-dots; as a synergistic activity, one that has struck a chord with Michele Brock of Arlington, Va. "I used to drink beer, and I used to run," says Brock, a human resources consultant and a veteran of about 60 hashes, "but I had never done both at the same time, so hashing has definitely changed my perspective on exercise."

Hash runs vary from locale to locale. Some runs are family-oriented. Some - the more traditional beer-soaked hashes - are just plain disorienting. But all hash runs feature a designated "hare" who lays out a meandering, five-or-six-mile cross-country course, and a gang of 30 to 100 fellow runners who pay a few dollars apiece to experience the thrill of blindly following the route from start to finish. The hare marks the trail with a series of baking-flour splotches or bits of shredded paper, often hiding the indicator at, say, the base of a fire hydrant or the far side of an out-of-the-way tree. Numerous false trails are included to liven up the proceedings. These white herrings can wind along for a quarter mile or more before ending abruptly in a floury X.

Hash trails are limited only by the imagination of the hare. They may wander through fields and streams, suburban neighborhoods, department stores, subway stations or giant storm drains. Over hill, over dale, over Chippendale. One creative hare even laid his trail through the main reading room of the Library of Congress. Wherever the marks lead, hashers stick to them like baying bloodhounds, communicating in a peculiar verbal shorthand. Slow runners continually bellow, "Are you?" (As in "Are you folks up ahead still hot on the trail?") The query brings one of two replies from those faster afoot: either the sweet sound of "On, on!" or "Checking!" (The former means "Continue on, full speed ahead"; the latter is the equivalent of a pause button, which, while it depends on the circumstances, usually translates as "We think we got suckered onto a false trail.")

When everyone has finally found the cold beer and the snickering rabbit at trail's end, by-the-book hashers like to conclude the running festivities by herding everyone into a circle and toasting the hare of the day.

About the only hash rule that is taken seriously is the one that forbids taking hashing seriously. "The whole idea behind the false trail is to get the front-runners to run back to where the pack is," says Marty Hanratty, 50, a normally respectable federal bureaucrat who has been hashing for nearly 20 years. "The best run is no longer than one hour. The front-runners finish in 50 minutes, and the last runners come in within the hour, so there's no more than 10 minutes' difference between the times."

According to the World Hash Handbook and Directory, there are nearly 1,100 hash clubs worldwide, including one in Antarctica and one in Tonga. A three-or-four-day Interhash is held every other year and draws as many as 1,000 participants from around the globe. The next get-together will be in Cyprus in 1996.

The U.S. has approximately 200 hash clubs, with a dozen in the Washington, D.C., area alone. Hash groups tend to have distinctive personalities, which run the gamut from sedate to manic. In Washington the White House Hash House Harriers - who count Hanratty among their regulars - have no connection with the White House, other than a firm conviction that the burger-loving jogger currently in residence would make a splendid hasher. The White House hashers bill themselves as "the drinking club with a running problem" and have an affinity for bawdy sing-alongs. The Mount Vernon (Va.) Hashers, on the other hand, are as reserved and purposeful as General Washington himself. They tend to conduct their runs at near warp speed. The Hash House Harriettes and Harriers fall somewhere in the middle on the geniality scale, while the Washington Men's Hash -the oldest hash in the country, with more than 1,000 weekly runs under its belt since 1972 - doesn't much cotton to outsiders.

Members of the U.S. military and diplomatic corps living overseas are hard-core hashing enthusiasts. When traveling abroad, you can count on the British, Australian and American embassy staffs to point you toward the closest hash. This is fitting, because hashing has expatriate roots. It was started in 1938 as a lark by bored British soldiers and civil servants stationed in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. A military chap by the name of Albert Stephen Gispert, reportedly drawing inspiration from the English children's game hare and hounds, is credited with being the Abner Doubleday of hashing. In theory, the Malaysian hash, which was held on Monday night, was a pleasant way to work off calories accumulated during a weekend of overindulgence. In practice, the hash became another excuse to knock back a few pints with the boys.

There are three creation myths behind the naming of the game hash. One holds that the mess hall at the British military base in Kuala Lumpur was dubbed the Hash House. Yet it is also said that the lads used to drink a postrun snootful at a local hangout called Harry's Hash House. The third story is that Malaysian street vendors used to chase after the runners, peddling bowls of noodles known as hash. Regardless of its etymology, hashing flourished while the British colonial empire dwindled away.

What makes the sport so appealing? Mari Clark, an anthropologist with the Development Technologies company in Washington and a sometime hasher, observes that "in a workaholic city," hashing is "a major stress-reduction thing." Hanratty speaks of friendships formed by shared "participation in something physical." He notes with pride that back in his hashing days in Jakarta, from 1983 to '88, "We had a colonel from the Indonesian police department who used to run with us, and a couple of Indonesian doctors. We had the local KGB person, British and American people, and some Japanese."

Without too much trouble a diehard hasher could hash-hop around the world, sampling exotic runs the way baseball fanatics seek out unusual stadiums. The Jakarta hash that Hanratty frequented had a $60,000-a-year budget, which provided for a beer truck to dispense cold brews after runs. In Bahrain, false trails have reportedly been marked with dead camels. John Studach, a stalwart White House Hash House Harrier, has fond memories of a goofy hash that wound through the backwoods of Waukesha, Wis. "In the middle of nowhere," he recalls, "there was a woman with a desk and chair. She was giving sexual advice to the hashers."

John Epple, who formed the White House Hash House Harriers in 1987 and holds the group's title of religious adviser for life, sells medical supplies to other countries and travels frequently. One day a few years ago Epple ran a hash in Indonesia and then hopped a plane to Australia that very night. Upon landing in Sydney, he telephoned a hash contact he knew only by her hashing nickname and inquired about the the local run.

"She said, 'I'll pick you up at six,' and I went hashin' that night," Epple says triumphantly. "When you start hashin', the world does become a kind of small place. It gives you an instant network in a city. And hashers like other hashers.

Gabra George, a teacher, is in the process of finding that out. He shows up at Studach's house in northwest Washington on a muggy night in early summer. It is Studach's turn to play hare, and some 40 of the faithful are gathered in his backyard waiting the 7 o'clock hash start.

George, a reserved 36-year-old Egyptian emigrant and onetime "local table tennis champion" in Cairo, was invited to Studach's by a friend who hashes. Before the night is over, George will huff and puff his way through thigh-high brambles and through thickets of poison ivy. At times he will pirouette madly in place, gazing high and low in hope of glimpsing a spot of flour. He will hot-step across two creeks and fall neck-deep into a third. Afterward, he'll turn bug-eyed while chugging a mug of beer in the company of five other hash virgins.

But those delights are yet to come. Right now the White House hashers are busy loosening up with a few preliminary beers while Studach reminisces about the three Dutch Marines who rode tricycles into a fellow hasher's swimming pool.

The White House Hash House Harriers drift into the front yard to perform what amounts to a parody of stretching exercises. They flail their arms wildly. They shake their legs. They sing nonsensical songs off-key. One hasher has on a black top hat. Another wears a multicolored beanie with a propeller on top. George surveys the scene. He *thinks* he's glad his friend invited him along.

"For some Hashing is a Hobbie, for others it is a way of Life" (or lack there of)