St. Patrick's Day Hash run!

If there is another holiday that is more associated with booze than St. Patrick's day I am not aware of it. So even though we only have one single Irish person in our group here in Chiang Mai, we still put a lot of effort into making this particular run a bit more special than others that take place throughout the year.

As always we make it as silly as possible and of course, there are tons of beers involved. Also, some funny statements are made about the Irish by the Irishman that is in our group. They seem to be more amusing when they come from someone that actually knows what he is talking about.

This years run was a semi-rural location but part of our run actually took us through a neighborhood. While this seems like the opposite of what we actually try to accomplish here when someone does that, for the most part the participants never suspect it because almost everyone tries to set trails that avoid going into any sort of cement environment. This serves a sort of great amusement for the Hare who set the trail because most people never think to try to go in the direction of where the houses are.

This very detailed overhead app that one of our members has gives us a really good idea of how the trail twists and turns and you can even see where the km markers are. I like it. Of course the actually running of the trail was very different for those of us that did it because there were false trails and circle checks along the way that would lead some of the members of the pack down an incorrect path only to have them be forced to turn back around once the true trail was detected.

You can see from the map that this trail took us through 3 different neighborhoods and even though these areas are not denesely populated and most of the people who live there are at work while we do our run, for the people that do live there I am sure they got some level of amusement when 30 strangely dressed men come running through their neighborhood shouting "On On!" As always we try to keep the peace as much as possible because it is not our intention to annoy or inconvenience anyone that lives in these places.

Also, as usual, we pick up garbage along the way and we never leave our own litter behind. This is an important part of what we do because at the end of the day 90% of s are not Thai and we do not want to ever be seen as some sort of public nuisance. At the moment we are friends with almost everyone in the community and there have only been a couple of instances in many years where people had a big enough problem with us to bring some sort of authority figure by to give us a telling off for trespassing, which we certainly were doing on this, and almost all the rest of our runs.

I wouldn't say that there was any sort of level of increased drinking just because it was St Paddy's day. But to be honest we already drink so much that the only way we would be able to one up our game would be to get spirits involved and we never do that. The way we look at it, beer is enough, no reason to fast forward the drunkenness by getting whiskey involved.

It was, as it always is, a good time. I once again want to invite anyone that is living in or just visiting Chiang Mai to come and join us. We have at least 3 meetups per week and all are welcome. Details available HERE. If you can't make it here, I encourage you to look up your area and see if there is a Hash House Harriers near you. It'll change your life for the better. I guarantee it!

On On!