The re-Hash

The world is a smaller kinkier place and it has been since last Thursday. I went on my first Hash run on that day. This group, like others, was said to be "a drinking club with a running problem." Having a bit of a running problem myself, I figured a hash run might be a kick.

I arrived to find a wide variety of people in a wide variety of shapes and colors milling about, some already drinking beer. The pink skirt, the green on green matching shorts and shirt, the billowing black bucket hat stand out in my memory. Some had the look and shape of typical runners, others had the look and shape of typical drinkers. Most were somewhere in between, and a few even had on really tight pants.

At some point during the milling I noticed a chalked "6:54 Hares off" on the sidewalk. The hash had already begun. Four runners, called hares, were out setting the course. They left small piles of orange flour to mark the trail and where the road split the hares left a chalk circle, called a check, to send those of us in the pack to scurry in all directions to search for the right path.

Meanwhile, the millers organized to introduce the vistors, those that had hashed with other clubs, and the virgins, those that had never hashed before. Introducing myself and giving the club-appropriate nod to the recruiter who had brought me to my hash I announced before the crowd, "I'm JustDave and Bound-to-Succeed made me cum." Experienced hashers have descriptive names. These names tend to be on the vulgar side, as does much of the "official" hash conversation. Throughout the night I would meet "Sticky Throt*le", "Cum Dumpl*ng" and "Dildo Bag*ins". There was a pack full of like-named hashers.

As the pack took off after the hares by following the flour and chalk on the streets, I felt the world shrink. We bounded over sidewalk and street, 50 or more people racing around like recess had just begun. Loosely, we had direction and purpose, something like beer, running, and company or maybe it was tracking the hares. The objective was not as clearly defined as the course we were trying to discover.

There was a fascinating "leader and lemming" mentality in action. Some leaders were clearly not trusted by experienced hashers. The checks tended to produce a moment or even a minute of standing around and waiting for the right trail to be discovered. Sounds of "bad trail" or some signal of the right trail could be heard before the stampede would start up again. Personally, I struggled some with cutting corners on the trail when the opportunity presented itself. Was I cheating myself? fellow hashers? the hashing deities? None of the above, it seemed. And the crowd of runners poured on, sometimes bunching together and other times stretching out in a dynamic band not entirely related to speed.

"BEER NEAR" may have been one of the most excited hasher calls of the day. Eventually everyone found the van that carried the beer and settled in for a gossip or a drink or both. A few could be heard re-hashing the current hash. Others were doing a bit of pre-hashing. Next week, apparently is Cinco de moustache; an event I was encouraged to attend based on my current facial hair situation.

After everyone had gathered again, and the hares had set out to set the second half of the trail, the group pounded away from the van in the coming darkness. Within 200 meters, we stumbled upon my first BC- back check. The whole pack then set about retracing our steps. The new trail soon plunged us into the woods where running became more of an exercise in not stumbling or getting poked by branches than a fluid movement with the legs. Eventually we emerged from the woods and continued on to the finish.

The second half of the hash seemed to have fewer checks and the pack began to unspindle into a long line of runners, much to the disappointment of my hash buddy. We bounded through places I'd never have found on my own, and wound through alleys that I didn't even know existed. The world seemed like ours, 50 or so runners out taking over the night. We pressed on until the sounds of "Beer Near" echoed through the air again.

I thought that beer and running wouldn't mix, but beer has never tasted so good. It was a bit like magic Gatorade, only with fewer electrolytes and more hops. I downed some beer as well as some delicious cookies and waited for "the circle."

The circle was a delightful place, filled with singing, revelery, and pornagraphic references. I'd describe it more thoroughly, but the song lyrics escape me, the revelery may have been beer-induced, and the pornagraphic references are probably best left untold.

The cops did stop by, but apparently they understand the world in all of its shrinked kink.

Talking to my TV

Every so often a commercial comes along that makes me say, "Spot on."

Hanes new commercial starring one Jennifer Love Hewitt is that commercial. Admittedly, I don't buy a lot of bras, but the attitude, the casting, the lines seem perfect.

Kids say the darnedest things
or I am bringing sexy back

I was passed by a 5-year old kid and his mom pushing a stroller today on the way home from the grocery store. He said something quietly to her. She turned around and said, "Did you hear what my son said?"

I had not. She asked him to repeat it.

"You look like Justin Timberlake."

In a rare moment I am going to not only admit that I work, but also admit that I care

Today, I learned about pivot tables in Excel. I was aware of the pivot table's existence, having seen a few in the wild, but it had never ocurred to me that I could create one. I didn't think that kind of power was granted to just anyone.

This may open up a whole other dimension to my spreadsheet experience. This must be how movie-goers felt when Smell-o-vision was introduced. This is like a whole new flavor of Excel. Although, I still have to figure out how to really use it. So right now it's still pretty much vanilla Excel with chocolate chip potential.

A greatest negated

I was not having the kind of Ultimate game that I prefer to have yesterday. I'd been more unbalanced than usual. I like to consider myself a pretty steady performer. I'd taken some early shots at the end zone with questionable throws and had some luck. That luck turned sour and I threw away some discs that I'd like to have back. I dropped a disc and I just felt a little out of whack. I had some good moments too, just eluding my defenders for a score and just missing on some defensive efforts. As the game wore on and both teams battled in and out of the lead, I found myself cutting break-side toward the endzone. My teammate, dipped down and threw a backhand around her defender that floated up into the air and toward the front cone and on its way out of bounds. With one of the best players in the local league on my heels, I jumped up after the disc. He bumped me as we went up, but with my body in the way he couldn't get to the disc. I latched on to it with my right hand and then as gravity pulled us down, I flicked my wrist and sent the disc flying over my left shoulder before we landed on the ground in a heap. I rolled over to see my teammate diving into the endzone to catch my desperate throw. A GREATEST! I barely reacted. It seemed right and lucky. Sometimes when a game is moving so quickly and I'm asking my body to be special, I don't get the opportunity to appreciate what is going on like I do when I watch someone else. I really don't know if it was disbelief or something else, but I didn't get to ponder it long. My defender questioned whether I had jumped from in bounds when I made this greatest attempt. Unfortunately, there was no way either of us could see where I had left the ground. Everyone else on the field was fairly far away from the play and no one had a very good perspective. We discussed it briefly and unfortunately decided that the best course of action was the do-over. One of my teammates told me that in my heart I should always remember this greatest, that I was in and it should have counted.

I want to.

I also want to remember the do-over. With the disc back in to the original thrower and a new defender on me, I made another cut for a throw. This was a force-side throw, but it floated as well. I reached for it with my right hand extended and missed. My defender flung his arm windmill-style to swat the disc down, but also came up empty. Spinning around the disc floated down at about shoulder level and I plucked it from the air. I made a couple looks up field and then threw an inside-out flick past my defender to a cutter for the score. For those that believe that the disc never lies, chalk that up as a victory. For those that think that's a lot of hooey, we still got the score.

It's the little moments that make this game so special. The ups and downs of competition, of pushing to the limits, of believing that if I just run hard enough or stretch far enough I will be rewarded-- by a disc that floats to just the right spot or sticks to an outstretched hand. It's impossible. It's beautiful.

My shoes should be on VH1

And not in that washed up, they had a career, but now they don't Behind the Music sort of way. No, sir. My shoes should be on Best Week Ever. Last week at this time, my shoes were hanging out in the Grand Canyon. This Tuesday evening, in all of their red-rock-stained glory they took to the track to help a friend meet a lifelong goal of running a sub-five minute mile. I don't know about my shoes, but I wasn't exactly sure this would be an easy task for anyone involved. We set out to come as close to five minutes as possible. My shoes were in charge of pacing, since they had some experience in this endeavor. The first lap was 76 seconds, one second too slow. It took some convincing, but my shoes and I very carefully resisted the urge to panic about starting off a little slower than expected. My shoes carried us through the second lap at 2 minutes and 31 seconds, exactly on pace for a five minute mile if it hadn't been for that start. Knowing that the third lap can often be tricky, the shoes found some fortitude. The third lap is where a lot of shoes start to ask really poignant questions, most of those questions starting with "What the ???" So the shoes surged to fight off these questions, and together we rolled through the third lap at 3 minutes and 45 seconds, perfectly positioned to run a 5 minute mile. The final lap, with the imaginary bell ringing through my laces brought at the best lap of the day. Cruising in that painful way that only shoes on the track know how to do, my shoes moved to the outside and encouraged my friend's shoes up next to me. Coming out of the last turn our shoes mirrored one another. Pulling and gutting, our shoes charged for the finish line that just wouldn't get there fast enough, finally crossing in 4 minutes and 57 seconds.

Somebody buy those shoes an odor-eater, they're having the best week ever.

Even big beards are tiny in the Grand Canyon

I had the look of a man on a backpacking trip, so long as the look includes cheap white plastic cat's eye sunglasses with fake rhinestones, a thick curly brown beard surrounded by week-old stubble, and a sweat-stained full-brimmed safari hat. I had that look, but the look was secondary to the attitude. The attitude is in the freeze-dried Teriyaki chicken and rice, in four liters of water, in full length toothbrushes and deodorant left behind. The attitude is in one short-sleeve shirt for three days, a sleeping bag that takes up 3/4 of that previously enormous blue backpack. The attitude is in 38 pounds, a walking stick, and the silent pleas to my knees and in the rankle of my ankles.

We'd descend a vertical mile while traversing six. We plunged into the canyon I'd always planned to save for later, but the company proved to be too much to pass up. I was a member of the death group, males in my age group tend to die in the Grand Canyon with greater frequency than others, but fortunately I had my family looking out for me. We made our way down the South Kaibab trail, only once passing through New Zealand, and only ten times passing through the scorch of a desert spring day. At 30 degrees shy of summer temperatures, my parched lips wondered how the summer crowd handled the intensity. At the bottom, just down the creek from Phantom Ranch, there was a campground with real toilets, lots of running water, and picnic tables. Phantom ranch had a small shop and a pay phone. The bottom of the Grand Canyon, where less than 1% of all Canyon visitors go, is really quite cushy. Cushy if you stay on the main trails and don't veer into the 47 degree Colorado river or into the vastness elsewhere. In our bid to reduce cushiness where we'd landed, we slept in our tents next to the creek, and only lit our tiny stoves when we needed to boil our bags of dinner or fire up our oatmeal.

Our trip up proved much easier, as it taxed heart and lungs rather than pounded down on my poor legs. Every bite of food transferred the weight on my back to my stomach- the poetry of "the weight of my decisions" dissipated into the calories for me to burn up, up, and up. We split the trip back to the rim into two sections of 4.5 miles each. The first half took us to the Indian Garden, where there was a campground, cushy, but not like Phantom Ranch. This walk may have been the most pleasent of all of our days, as the morning crowd was thinner. The trails we chose, even with 99% of the visitors hanging out near the rims, were surprisingly crowded. Moments of solitude were best caught between breaths and breaths were best caught in the narrow sections where the sun wasn't shining and the mules had not recently found relief. Or maybe it was the following morning, when the rim was just a few hours away, the bag was just a few pounds lighter, and the trenches carved by those same mules made for steps that resembled starting blocks, allowing hikers to propel up the hill when they found the right rhythmn. With a bounce in my step, and most of 2 liters emptied from the bladder on my back into the bladder in my middle, I began a final surge through the rim crowds. I passed hikers that wouldn't leave the relative comforts of the canyon wall. I passed families with their flip-flop shod children bounding down the trail and I thought about the nearly 15 miles behind me. Was I emerging from the big hole a different person? There was a sense of purpose in my step and a sense of accomplishment. I could feel the admiring stares of the underdressed as I lugged my now lighter backpack up the final yards. Putting the enormous pit behind me, I began focusing on the only pit that would be my reward- the pit toilet. With a final high five from the boy scouts that tormented my elders, I made it to the bathroom and to the top of the canyon. I felt more triumph than I'd anticipated and more pride when my family joined me. There was a twinkle inside matched only by my rhinestones. Immediately, I began to wonder what was next and what look I would need to cultivate to cross that off my list.