More Relevant

So I'm still more or less gonna keep away from talking about the actual trip, but this post (I feel) contains the most about the experience. The topic here is crowd racing.

So we should probably define this first. Wiki and Google are silent on the matter (maybe I'm using the wrong term), so I'll take a stab at it myself.

Crowd Racing: A race in which people try to move from source to sink as quickly as possibly, with the precondition that the space in between the source and the sink is filled with a moving crowd.

I was first introduced to crowd racing in middle school. Back then, we had silly block lunches or something, followed by half-period long activity blocks. This is actually pretty good planning on the school's part, but nvm that. To get to our activity rooms from the cafeteria, we'd have to walk down one of two hallways. However, both hallways would be filled with crowds of moving students, one group outbound and one group inbound. For those who have never tried this, it is actually very much fun. The first time Alex Gomes suggested I join their crowd race, I won handily. I was very happy and surprised until I realized that they had not raced, but had stood there laughing at me as I sprinted off. After that one trick, though, we would race back most days, and I still credit this habit with cutlivating my need to run randomly.

For a long time, crowd racing was just an amusement. Then we got to Disney World, and I realized that this was actually a very important skill to have. Amusement parks are known for their rides, but in reality you spend far more time getting from place to place than you do on the rides themselves, and if you don't know how to crowd race, this process takes 10 times longer.

Of course, the crowd racing involved is not conventional; there is one extra rule, and a couple of novel obstacles. The rule is this: not only do you have to move as fast as possible, you have to do this inconspicuously and with minimal disruption. This rule bothered me quite a bit. When I'm running through hallways or whatnot at school, I can jump out randomly to the side, as long as its timed right, and people will not be particularly surprised: they're used to eccentric people doing dumb things. But in public, you try that, and you will invariably have a little child randomly speed up and crash into you, wasting precious moments as the child's parent scolds you for being an idiot. In addition, even non-disruptive running is not satisfactory. I probably should've realized that randomly running is extremely suspicious, but its never mattered before. For instance, whenever I take a bus (whether from home or my lab or w/e) to a metro station, I always get down and start running into the station. I always wondered if someone would stop me and accuse me of theft, but no one ever did, so I figured it was ok. The kind officer at Disney had no such restraint >_>. My dad had just called me, telling me he had bought lunch (we were at Animal Kingdom) in Asia, but, because of the two trays and overflowing coke cup he was carrying, had taken a wrong turn and had no idea where he was or how to find us. I decided to run around and check all the places within a certain distance of the place he'd ordered food, but I was stopped soon after I started. The officer was rather suspicious, but since I only had my cell phone on me (and it was very obviously mine, it had a very recognizable picture for background), he let me go fairly quickly. So I could not run and I could not make random leaps into clearings.

Now for the obstacles. These pissed me off a good deal. These were: obnoxious little kids, strollers, wheelchairs, fat people. The little kids had no idea what they were doing, they'd just randomly get in the way, even if you were walking normally. They'd also make random sounds (like zoom, whoosh, etc.) and randomly hit their siblings while laughing. If I could convince them that I was running fast enough, though, they'd usually get out of the way. They were far more annoying while standing in line, but that's a story for later.

Wheelchairs I suppose can't be helped, but my god those things are annoying. They take up much more space than people, and there's really no room to maneuver around them, so they just completely destroy your ability to get wherever you wanna go. I wonder why the hell people who cannot walk come to amusement parks (can you really go on any of the fun rides?). So often I found myself wondering why the laws protecting disabled rights extend to things like amusement parks. (Note that I am not typically so openly insensitive, and this is not how I feel right now, but at the time, after a while in the sun and slow moving crowds, I was getting pretty fed up.)

Next we have the strollers. These were hindering for the same reasons as the wheelchairs mostly, but there was one other major factor. Half the strollers I saw had kids of age greater than 5. So I figure there's two options:

1. Your kid's under 5. In which case, (s)he's obviously not gonna enjoy Disney, why the five are you bringing them.
2. Your kid's over 5. In which case, your kid clearly doesn't need a stroller, they're just lazy, so tell them to get up and walk.

So yea, strollers just made me much more upset, because they're so daum.

And finally, the fat people. I suppose these were the most prevalent, but at least they were people, so I could maneuver around them fairly easily. I noticed something interesting actually. In my mind, there's supposed to be more fat guys than fat women, but here it was the reverse. I'm not sure why (I had that notion and why its the way it is).

So yea, now for what I actually picked up about crowd racing. The trick back in school has always been to move very fast and never stop moving. The same goes here, more or less, except that you want to choose a good starting speed and make more deliberate movements. You should never have to slow down, because you won't be speeding up again if you do.

Anyway, crowd racing is actually really fun and pretty useful too. I'd advise you all to try it sometime.