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Daniel Ohly was out at the Boggy Creek Trail in the Rosewood Neighborhood last year when he saw a man drive up and park alongside the gravel trail.
“He gets out of his car,” Ohly recounted, “and he puts this H-E-B bag on the ground.”
The mystery man then pulled out a spice container and began sprinkling kitchen flour along the trail and surrounding areas. He’d make a mark, walk 10 to 20 feet, then repeat the process.
Ohly said most of the markings were just plain dots of flour, but every once in a while, he’d make an X or an arrow or some other symbol.
“He is totally in his own energy and his own vibe,” he said. “He's just plopping along.”
After a while, the flour dropper became a public spectacle.
“The trail is full,” Ohly said. “People are seeing them do this. Dog walks, people running, everyone is seeing him doing this. He's getting a couple of side eyes.”
Ohly has lived in this part of East Austin for more than a decade, and this was not the first time he’d witnessed this type of activity on the Boggy Creek Trail.
It was, however, the first time he did something about it.
After following the flour dropper for a while, Ohly finally approached and asked the stranger for an explanation.
That’s when he found out the man was a member of a running group called the Austin Hash House Harriers, and the flour was for a game they play.
‘A drinking club with a running problem’
Barbara Glaser Fryer, one of the club’s longest tenured members, explained how the game works.
“The object of the game is to go out and follow a trail,” she said, “to get to the end where the beer is.”
Every week, somebody in the group goes out with a bag of flour, lays a temporary trail, and after everybody is done, they drink beer.
“The joke is that it’s a drinking club with a running problem,” Glaser Fryer said.
Some of the markings Ohly saw the hasher – that’s what they’re called – lay down were meant to guide the runners, and some were meant to confuse them.
“The object of the game is to get everybody there almost at the same time,” Glaser Fryer said.
The hashers who run at the front of the pack are more likely to get turned around and misdirected, and as they make their way back to the correct trail, the runners behind them learn from their mistakes.
“It's almost like you're solving a puzzle,” she said.
The goal of hashing is not to come in first. The goal is for everybody to finish.
People around the world have been playing this running game since at least the late 1930s when British troops were stationed in what is today Malaysia.
“The British soldiers were all sitting around getting fat,” Glaser Fryer said. “So they had their Malaysian guides go and set trails. They would go for a run and get healthy, feel better, camaraderie, that kind of thing.”
A lot of the early hashers used to gather for food and drinks at diners called hash houses.
Over the past few decades, that little game blossomed into an entire subculture. Beijing, Mexico City, New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. – and nearly every metro area imaginable – have one if not multiple kennels (that’s what each individual group is called).
While there is no exact number for how many of these running clubs exist in the world, most estimates put the figure somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000.
The Austin kennel was launched in 1985, and the group has more than 100 active members.
The hashers eat, drink, sing sea shanties and heckle each other at the end of each run.
“Nobody comes out alive,” Glaser Fryer said. “It's all in good fun.”
Hashing is not just a casual fitness group or just a drinking group, it is a way to escape the routine of everyday life. It’s also something you can only truly understand through participation.
The Middle East Hash
Just a few weeks after my conversation with Glaser Fryer, I found myself in the Walnut Creek Greenbelt, surrounded by hashers and chatting with a man named Babagagoush.
“I’m from Lebanon,” he said. “And the first trail I organized we made baba ganoush, so from that derived Babagagoush.”
Babagagoush is his hash name. These are nicknames given to people who have been with the group a while. Here in the United States, they’re often vulgar.
On the day I joined the Austin Hash House Harriers for a run, Bababagoush set the trail alongside a woman named Seven Year Bitch.
After around half an hour of waiting for everybody to arrive at the starting location – the Copperfield Nature Trail in Northeast Austin – Seven Year gathered everybody up.
“Welcome to trail number 2159 of the Austin Hash,” she called out before explaining the basic hashing symbols.
Plain dots and arrows mean you’re going in the right direction. X’s mean the trail can split up in any direction. And F stands for false, meaning you’re going in the wrong direction.
During the presentation, one of the hashers asked if there are caves or waterfalls on the trail.
“All of them,” Seven Year replied. “There’s volcanoes, too.”
For first-time hashers, this all can be confusing, which is why I checked in with a man named Crusty Beaver.
“You’re going to want to follow the people yelling ‘on-on’ or blowing a whistle,” he told me.
On-on: This is a phrase you should always be listening for. It means a hasher ahead of you has found the correct path.
Beaver also gave me advice for the worst-case scenario.
“If you get completely f- - - - - - lost and can’t find anybody,” he whispered, “come back here and we’ll come looking for you.”
As we started the hash, Seven-Year Bitch sent us off with words of encouragement.
“Have at it you wankers,” she said as people crossed the starting line. “F- - - you, f- - - you, f- - - you.”
On the trail
The first 10 to 15 minutes of the Middle East Hash were straightforward, but I drank most of a hard seltzer before we took off, so I still got lost.
I sought help from a man named Fupa, who found out about hashing the way a lot of people do.
“I had just gotten done with an Ironman and was looking for something to do,” he said.
Hashing draws in a lot of athletes who, for one reason or another, change their priorities.
“Most of my friends that I've been hanging out with the past couple of years were still in training, doing like 20-mile runs and 80-mile bike rides,” Fupa said. “I'm like, I just want to go hang out and have a beer.”
At certain points on the trail, the water was knee deep. Many of the hashers seemed to view this as a positive thing.
“The last couple of times I’ve been to Austin, it’s been awesome like this,” a hasher named Just Korinne told me.
We sloshed through the creek for about 20 minutes before the trail led us back to land. That’s when I met a hasher who once held a very important position within the Austin kennel.
“They call me Bubbles the Sad Beer Clown,” he said proudly.
Bubbles has been with the Austin Hash House Harriers since 2005.
“When I was first hashing, we had a Beermeister who was responsible for bringing the beer and drinks every week, who used to do a terrible job of it,” he explained. “Well, it ends up that if you bitch out the Beermeister, you get named Bubbles the Sad Beer Clown and promptly elected the new Beermeister.”
Meeting this sad beer clown felt like fate, because just a few moments later, the hash turned into a cul-de-sac, and we came across a symbol that spelled out BN.
This stands for “beer near,” and these are stops where hashers regroup, make sure nobody is lost, and rehydrate however they see fit.
For the first part of the run, I hung back and watched how the other hashers were doing things.
For the second portion, I decided to run as fast as possible. Hashers call this being a racist (or the more politically correct term: a front-running bastard).
The energy at the front of the pack was a lot more frenetic. Instead of lightly jogging to each mark, these hashers sprinted in all directions, cut parts of the trail, and constantly yelled out to each other.
After an hour of sprinting through portions of the Walnut Creek Greenbelt and suburban communities in Northeast Austin, the trail took a turn onto Yager Lane, where we found a symbol that said on-in.
This marked the end of the running portion. Next came food, more alcohol, and heckling.
Heckling and accusations
Because this hash was celebrating Babagagoush’s birthday, we ate Middle Eastern food.
“We have eggplant, salad, hummus and baba ganoush,” he told me. “You relax and then we do a circle where we accusate each other.”
Accusations are where people get hazed for skipping parts of the trail, not coming to the group consistently or being a virgin. (That’s what you call somebody hashing for the first time.)
“Here’s to the virgin, he’s true blue,” they chanted at me. “He is a hasher through and through.”
The hashers made me chug most of a Mango White Claw and this one chalky white liquid, which they referred to as “semen.”
Then after more than an hour and a half eating, drinking, and heckling each other, the Middle East Hash began to wind down. That’s when I met the person with the most Texan hash name I heard all day.
“Lady Bird’s Johnson,” he introduced himself. “Singular possessive.”
When he arrived in his electric wheelchair earlier, the entire kennel erupted into a twisted ritual where they where they began shouting the same three letters at him.
“DFL,” they all screamed. “DFL, DFL, DFL.”
I asked LBJ to explain.
“Dead f- - - - - - last,” he told me. “I was very last this time. We don’t care if you’re first or last. We celebrate you all the same.”
LBJ’s real name is Bill Corrigan and for many years now, he’s been a runner. Corrigan has completed marathons in Houston, New York, Berlin and about a dozen other places.
Then in 2022, he was diagnosed with ALS, a disease that over time causes the motor neurons in the brain to lose connection with the muscles in the body.
“I don’t think I got ALS from hashing,” he said.
To Corrigan, ALS stands for adaptive lifestyle, which means that after his diagnosis, he went on to do the London Marathon in a wheelchair.
Hashing is a primal bonding experience, one that involves alcohol, bad words and offensive jokes. I asked Corrigan how long he intended to keep doing it.
“I’ll hash as long as I can,” he told me. “When I end up, if I end up in a feeding tube, these crazy people will be pouring beer down it.”
The Austin Hash House Harriers meet every Sunday. Nobody comes out alive.
