The Ballbreaker is one of our premiere events and it attracts world-class athletes from all around the world to participate in our mostly off-road near half-marathon. Ok, that's not exactly true: Most of the people are local and are held together with menthol crème and compression bands.
It's still a lot of fun though even though most of the people don't even finish the entire trail.
The pack normally starts out with gusto and everyone is vying for the top 3 places. I've never understood when people do this because they are very aware of the fact that there are 20 more kilometers to go and most of them are quite aware of the fact that they are not going to complete it all.
This is why we establish "wimp" trails and also bail-out points for the people that decide to get a ride back to camp rather than face potential heat stroke.
We had a decent turnout but we are still seeing significantly smaller numbers than we used to have pre-Covid. That pandemic really screwed us as a lot of our members were forced to return to their home countries and then they had trouble getting back in. Thailand recently re-instated some entry restrictions because of the Chinese being let out of the pen and I guess we'll just have to continue to deal with this. Enough with the doom and gloom though, because the Ballbreaker was still an amazing day for all that could make it.
We hadn't planned on it but a bunch of buffalo came to the ballbreaker as well. There's no need to be afraid of these guys. They probably could hurt you if you forced them to do so but mostly they don't really care about anything getting near them since almost nothing can hurt them.
Unfortunately no one who did the entire 20km recorded it, so here we have an aerial view of the mid-course. The wimp trail was a mere 5km and all we do is laugh at the people that do that one. Just kidding of course. The whole idea behind the Hash House Harriers is to get together with friends and have a good time. If you do happen to get a little exercise that is just an added bonus.
Remember all of those people that were running or jogging at the start? Well it didn't take very long for that all to come to a close. Very few of the participants came across the finish line running and the ones that did probably only ran the last 100 meters or so to pretend as though they had been doing that the entire time. We all know your game you liars!
While this is the coolest time of year in Chiang Mai, it is still blisteringly hot by western standards and there was plenty of sweat left in the jungle as a consequence.
So now that it is over we have to wait an entire year before we do it again. That's fine because we will still be having 3 runs per week, every week, for the foreseeable future. Come and join us anytime you want!
