PTH2 RUN ON 23Aug09

On two occasions that I hashed with Penampang Tua Pa’au Hash House, the venue shifted from their usual territory in Penampang and intruded into Inanam vast hashing space. Humidity was quite dense as evidenced by our sweating bodies even before we could start the run. While still lingering around to wait for “Dirty Gerty” to arrive, somebody just yelled “On-On!”
The climb started just immediately across the registration kiosk with slope between 45 to 60 degrees. There were slower ones blocking us that caused heavy “traffic jam” but somehow those intrepid hashers just cleared a few trees, swung from left to right, grabbed protruding roots then hauled themselves up. For the slower ones it was long & arduous trek up the hill with barely enough twigs, trees, vines or roots to hold onto.
Cherry-Anne was behind me when we reached the first ridge then diverted to the right only to be taken up to the next part of the ridge. After negotiating a few rocky flood-path, we were already at the crossroad of short & long run. Cherry-Anne hesitated for a while, ‘coz she knew when we started, the hare wasn’t out yet for almost 4hrs inside the jungle. With proper prodding, she finally decided to join us and by that time Tracy was way ahead of us.
Surprisingly the next bend was a run down into streams that, feeds water into another tributaries of the main Kionsom River. Passing an isolated house down the valley, the paper continued to snake into another kampong houses with equally energetic children playing around. Soon we were at the start of another real climb which was becoming torturous even for season hashers like us. Decided to slow down to just keep Anne going at her own paces but somehow rather when we reached another farmer’s hut, we bumped into another ESB who was then resting by the tree.
The next climb was the killer one as we literally started from the bottom of the hill then scaled up to about 2km high. The first 100 yards was just an easy climb but as we gained heights, it got steeper and steeper that sometimes, Anne would just take advantage of few drooping tress to lean on and rest. The vegetation was not really dense as we were still inside the rubber trees plantation and the weather started to get cooler. From the distance, we could see Tracy now--inching her way up along cleared footpaths.
From that junction on, there were four of us struggling to reach the top along the seemingly unending steps to nowhere. Despite our pathetic condition, we could still sing “On-On” in between breath hoping we could hear someone in front of us or the bobtail behind us. Yet all we could hear were the heavy breathings which were most of the time muted by our heavily dragged footsteps. Then another energetic guy came along and overtook us and in few minutes he was gone. Finally Anne & that other guy also doubled their time and were gone.
With few more steps, Tracy finally reached the top of the ridge then it was a great relief when could finally run down the hill. There were no more souls in front of us so I decided to go faster which forced Tracy also to follow from behind, gabbing trees & hopping from steps to steps while simultaneously avoiding protruding roots and wayward thorny vines. As we went farther down, we could hear people murmuring or shouting ‘On-On’ at us then lose them again. I guess we’ve been running down the hill for the next 20mins when we bumped into Anne & her escort in the company of Oscar ‘Osakai’ Chai.
It seemed that the papers leading to exit point were all mixed up. Anyway with the presence of ‘Osakai’ I knew we were safe to get back to the base. We actually came out about 500mtrs down the road to the drink wagon, which according to Tracy was about 1.45mins running time. Well I could have clock better had I not opted to pace with Anne earlier. On-ON