Hash House Harriers

So today I ended up on one of the few trains in this country, on a ride out of town to go for a run with the Monrovia chapter of the Hash House Harriers. Some of you may have heard of HHH before -- apparently they have chapters all around the world. It is often referred to as a drinking club with a running habit.

Typically the group meets on Saturday afternoons, choosing a new neighborhood each time for its run. However on the last Sunday of the month, the group takes a trip outside of the city, to explore a new region and find a good place for an afternoon-long bbq (the drinking starts whenever you want it to, though most seemed to wait until the run was over). It was an interesting mix of people -- probably one half was Liberian, and the other consisted of ex-pats from around the world who are in Monrovia working for one NGO or another.

So as I understand it (and they have a Wikipedia entry, so you can learn more for yourselves), HHH was started in the 1930s by some British officers and ex-pats who wanted to have a little fun at the end of the week. Someone was designated the hare, and he set the route by dropping/flinging pieces of paper on the ground, frequently ending up with a route with many sharp turns, dead ends, etc. Designed this way, the fast runners end up charting the course, turning around when they hit a dead end and leading the way for the runners who are behind them, who end up doing an about face and never really covering the entire route.

Having met one of the club members last night through mutual friends, the three new volunteers and one of our colleagues decided to try it out. We got on a train that had a flatbed car in back, and ended up in plastic lawnchairs on this flatbed, heading out into the countryside. I took a few pictures of the villages and scenery we passed, posted here. The countryside was lovely, very green and quiet. As our train hurtled along, the conductor kept blowing the horn and people who lived along the route, who rarely see this train in operation, would run out and wave to us. It's still pretty startling to see some of the homes people live in here, although, strangely, I'm sure I will get used to it soon.

I thought I was really smart before we left, smearing on the sunblock in advance of the run. Well, I had forgotten how dusty it gets here, and after riding on the back of a sooty flatbed for an hour, dusty air rushing by, the only thing my sunblock was good for was catching every grain of dirt and adhering it to me. I hoped I'd just sweat it off during the run, but no luck. After 30 minutes of trail running in some serious heat, I was downing some water when a British woman and her colleague asked me how I got so dirty. Lovely. I cleaned up a bit, and then spend the afternoon trying to learn the various songs being sung, and had a mini-initiation, along with the other first-timers, into the HHH.