2012 Polar Bear Run photos by Michele Stapleton
On Saturday afternoon, in between the women’s and men’s hockey games, a blur of colorful, hollering, half-dressed Bowdoin students sprinted around campus for no particular reason other than to have fun on a chilly winter day. The horde of runners — some in body paint, others in costumes or bathing suits — took off from the Watson Arena, ran down Coffin Road, and then barreled their way through the Smith Union and Druckenmiller Hall before running around the quad and back to the hockey rink.
“We startled some studiers, who then joined in,” Sam Hanson ’11 said. Clearly, books were no match for the infectious spread of the runners’ “passion and cheer.”
Hanson helped organize the run with the A-Team, short for Alcohol Team, which highlights and organizes campus activities that don’t involve alcohol. He described the Polar Bear Run as a “new-age adaptation of a tradition we found out about that used to happen in Bowdoin’s old age. We wanted a winter tradition that would make a bright spot in the cold season.”
The A-Team liked the idea of reinventing the Polar Bear Run because it promotes fun that’s not centered around drinking, Hanson explained.
More than 100 people ran in the sprint, roughly half men and half women, according to Hanson, and more than $700 in prizes were given away, including an iPad and gift certificates to local stores and restaurants. The Polar Bear Ax was given to Mason Moss ’12 and Hartley Brody ’12 for showing the most “fire and spirit,” Hanson said. “Not only did they run the race at a ferocious pace,” he explained, but they also gathered a crew decked out in bow ties and paint who cheered throughout the run and both hockey games.
NOT A FUN OR HAPPY MOMENT … DISAPPOINTED IN THIS EMBARRASSING EVENT AND THE COLLEGE’S WILLINGNESS TO PROMOTE AND PUBLISH THIS … I WENT TO BOWDOIN, TOO … AND I WOULD NOT MAKE A FOOL OF MYSELF ON THAT CAMPUS … EVER
Keith, I agree with you that this event was “NOT A FUN OR HAPPY MOMENT.” In fact, I think that is impossible to have fun unless behaving in a proper and civilized manner, while of course dressed in formal attire. It is an outrage that the college allows for any events to which this definition of fun does not adhered. I propose the college sponsor a mandatory event in which students are required to walk calmly through campus dressed in formal attire while sipping tea and engaging in intellectual discourse. This would be much more fun and may erase the “EMBARRASSING EVENT” of the polar bear run.
I am glad Keith would not make a fool of himself on that campus. It is much better that he make a fool of himself on the Daily Sun.