When a circle check goes horribly wrong :(

In order to understand this story you need to first know what a "circle check" is in regards to the Hash House Harriers.

A circle check is a regular part of any HHH event and this is there to make the run more fun for the people involved. When you are running a trail and encounter one of these it means that the trail is not clearly marked from this point forward. It is intentional that the people involved do not know where the trail is from this point forward. They have to search for it. The marking for the continuation of the trail is meant to be somewhere within 100 meters diameter of where the circle is found. The people who got there first, who are referred to as FRB's (front-running bastards) have to now spend time looking for the real trail which will be marked with either paper or some flour scattered around on the ground.

it's somewhere out there. Good luck!

The purpose of this isn't just to make the run more exciting - which it does accomplish - but it is also to keep the group together. The people at the front of the pack aren't actually supposed to get too far away from the walkers as we want everyone to kind of finish around the same time. I am a FRB and I have been on trails where because of me being one of the ones that was searching for the trail, that the walkers actually passed me several times and some of them finished at the same time as me despite the fact that I was running.

This all normally goes to plan but on one particular day this went horribly wrong and it was at a location that is somewhat protected by the people who own the land.

As I've stated many times before, when we do our runs we are almost always trespassing on someone else's land. In this particular case this was a jumbo-jet graveyard of sorts owned by Thai Airways.

When the people who made the trail did so, they put down their flour to indicate the trail as they always do but due to time restrictions they didn't realize that some of the flour had been wiped out because of something. It could have been a land owner who saw it on the ground and then not knowing what it was, disposed of it, or it could have simply been an irrigation system that wiped it out in the middle of the night. We don't actually know.

What we do know is that we were stuck at a circle check at one point and nobody could find where the trail continued towards. At that point we had about 40 people all searching and since the continuation of the trail is supposed to always be in a 100 meter diameter of the circle, we didn't really know what to do. People were going much further than 100 meters from the position and eventually someone found some flour that was much further away than 100 meters, it was probably more like 300 meters and this wasn't even the intended discovery point.

The real area where the flour that indicates where the trail continues simply wasn't there and we don't have any idea why.

Now imagine that you are the security guard or just a concerned neighbor in this area and you look out your window and you see dozens of people lingering around a bunch of stashed airplanes out your window. At some point you are going to become concerned and call the authorities... and that is exactly what happened. Had we all just been walking by as a group with our brightly colored clothing, people wouldn't think anything bad was going on but in this situation we had a bunch of people that were carefully searching the entire area in our search for flour, and I can admit, this looks very suspicious.

By the time we actually did make it through the course, the police were already there having a discussion with one of the Hares (the people who set the trail) and thankfully, he was one of the few people in our group that is completely fluent in Thai.

one thing you need to understand about Thai authority figures is that they are normally not a joking bunch. They are extremely serious about their jobs and this is even more true when it comes to foreigners. It looked like we were going to get in trouble for the first time since I have been involved.

The only reason why we didn't get in trouble is because the land isn't marked with any sort of "keep out" or "no entry" signs in any language. Other than the airplanes, this part of the city is just some back roads that look like anywhere else. The officials hung around for a bit, probably looking for some sort of recognition of their authority, which we gave them. But the fact of the matter is that we weren't actually breaking any laws. We do not climb fences nor will we go onto land that is marked for "no trespassing."

Once it was explained to them what we are doing there and they understood that we had no bad intents, one of the officials stuck around to participate in our "circle." he spoke a bit of English and had a bunch of laughs as we all made one another sit on the ice and drank beer. This security guard would eventually later come to participate in a few events with us later but I think the fact that mostly we speak English, kind of intimidated him and he didn't remain a member, which is a pity because we have a few members that we found by exactly this sort of situation.

This marked the one and only time that I felt like we were going to get in trouble as an organization and this something we really want to avoid seeing as how we go out of our way with fundraisers to support the community so we will be seen as a "good" organization that doesn't make any problems for people - which is true.

But that day will live in everyone's memory as the day where a small accidental mistake all of a sudden made us look suspicious rather than the silly man-children that we are.

Nobody has ever been arrested because of our events and we do 3 of them a week. Feel free to come and join us if you wish. Full details are available here