SEXY WALRUSTRIATHLON & ADVENTURE CLUB
The lore · objects of questionable significance
The founding story, the race format, the wooden walrus, the hymn and the bestiary — everything the club tells with feeling, kept in one place and marked for what it is.
01 / The founding story
An 1881 expedition to Svalbard, a walrus who could play cards, and a captain with a whip and no explanation for it.
The club’s founding tale has arrived, in the club’s own words: the diary of Simon Grundlethrope, in two parts, from the shelter at Hammerfest to the ice, the storm and the famous Walrus Run.
Club fiction, written and supplied by the club — not a historical document.
Read the founding tale02 / The race
HISTORICAL FORMAT · 2016We race each September · the annual club race
The slower you were, the sooner you went. Theoretically, everyone finished together.
The club races each September. The documented handicap format sent the previous slowest finisher — White Fang — out first; the rest followed in staggered waves. The fastest elapsed time earned the title Sir Walrus.
An account of the club’s past format, not an entry form. Race date, location and entry details for this September are confirmed by the club closer to the time.
Enter the water.
Question previous decisions.
Find your bicycle.
Maintain plausible deniability.
Proceed on foot.
Develop a better explanation.
The old pecking order: Pig · Slug · Cucumber · Monster · Beast · Seal Elite.
Read the 2016 account03 / The trophies
EVERY SEPTEMBER SINCE 2013Everything the club actually contests is decided on one September afternoon.
The Horn of Glory goes to the first home. It is a tusk. Nobody has ever suggested it should be anything else.
White Fang goes to the last home — the trophy, the title and the obligation to explain what happened, for a year.
The Golden Horn goes to the fastest woman home.
The season-long points championship, and the giant wooden Norse that went with it, fell away in recent years and has been retired from this site.
Every year since 201304 / Objects of questionable significance
The previous race’s winner carries the walrus on their back.
A tradition with rather more presence than a certificate.
The wooden walrus, photographed by the club. His name remains his own business.
The illustrated imagination
Club lore. A very loose relationship with normality.
Supplied artworks, not documentary records.
Club lore · as the club tells it
Here begin the annals of an unusual club: of tusks, of handicaps, of a wooden walrus with an unusually demanding travel schedule. Some of this happened. All of it is told with feeling.
The previous season’s slowest finisher is sent away first, on the grounds that everyone should be equally inconvenienced. This is the honour of the White Fang.
The fastest elapsed time of the day takes the title Sir Walrus for the year, and with it the obligation to be modest about it in every retelling.
He travels on the back of the previous race’s winner. The walrus does not train. The walrus does not need to.
There is a song. It is sung. Nobody has yet produced evidence that it helps.
Ex aqua surgit, dentibus duobus,
Walrus intrepidus, frigore perfusus;
qui prior natat, laudem non accipit,
qui tardissimus, primus incipit.
Out of the water he rises, on two tusks,
the fearless walrus, drenched with cold;
whoever swims first receives no praise —
the slowest among us is the first to begin.
Written for the club as a piece of invented mythology. It is not a historical, liturgical or religious text, and no genuine manuscript stands behind it.
The handicap categories, rendered in heraldic form, as is proper for creatures of this standing.
The last entry in the bestiary
One September the water will come up and not go back down. It will take the slipway first, then the lane the club rides out on, then the wall everyone leans against for the briefing. The course will be gone, and the argument about the tide will finally be settled in the tide’s favour.
The club’s position is unchanged and has been minuted every year since 2013. The race is the second Saturday in September. If that Saturday arrives and there is no longer a course, the club still intends to be at the start line, holding a tusk, waiting to be told differently.
The end of the world is club mythology, not the club’s calendar. The calendar says the second Saturday in September, and the calendar has never yet lost.
The grading ladder
NINE WORLDS, NINE GRADESNorse cosmology had nine worlds. The club has found a use for them: one grade per world, from the mile you do in October to whatever George suggests next.
The September race, done by people who could reasonably stop. Two hours of decent company and one bad decision at the start of the run.
A summer ride, no mechanicals, tailwind out and back, everyone home smiling. Suspicious, and never repeated.
The club meal. Plates that arrive after the bill, wine that is somehow also on the table. Nobody swims the next morning.
The winter club ride in the dark, on the lanes that flood, lit by one tail light between four riders. Best club run of the year, never photographed.
Anything with a cut-off time. The Channel relay, the hundred-mile ride, the swim in water the club described as “refreshing” in the report and something else in the car park.
The January open water. Entered voluntarily by people with no memory of the previous January.
The hot ride nobody planned for. The club has a rule about hydration and ignores it once a decade.
Anything anyone has qualified for. The club sends a report and a photograph of somebody else’s medal.
Whatever George suggests next. He will describe it as “a laugh”. It never is, entirely.
Grades are the club’s own. The nine worlds are the real ones, and so is the trap. The ladder lives here, with the rest of the club’s mythology, rather than on the race page.
Club mythology and comic self-regard, offered as such. It is not a record of verified events, a statement about any real person, or advice of any kind.
The moving image
Swim, bike and run footage in club colours.
The club anthem
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