I was 19 years old, a sophomore at Princeton, and the occasion was a now-infamous campus ritual called the Nude Olympics. It takes place every year, at midnight on the day of the winter's first snowfall. Hundreds of naked sophomores run in circles around one of Princeton's most hallowed courtyards. They whoop and scream, leap and cartwheel through snowdrifts, then take off in a streak across campus. Some rush the library. The boldest head for town, blazing nude through restaurants.

The first Nude Olympics took place sometime in the early '70s, though its initiators seem to have been too wasted to remember exactly why; certainly the tradition was in full swing by 1976, when brazen Olympians ended their run with a splash in Dillon pool, interrupting a championship swim meet. In their infant years, the Olympics used to feature organized events -- naked wheelbarrow races, three-legged relays -- but gradually things simplified. These days, when the games begin, the nude mostly just run like hell.

When Nude Olympians began their laps my freshman year, I was sound asleep in my dorm, cuddled under the weight of a "French in Action" textbook. When I awoke, it was with a jolt: a big-gutted sophomore named Ciro had decided to run bare-assed sprints down my hallway, and his footfalls created a near earthquake. Drawn to the window by the sounds of rabid howling, I squinted out in time to see a few figures bounding through the shadows, naked but for hats and boots and headed who knows where. I drifted back to sleep wondering what brand of madness had gripped these people, and whether, when next year's first snow fell, I might be gripped by it too.

I doubted it. As exhibitionists go, I was an unlikely candidate. I was the prototypical good girl, the sort friends always want their parents to meet but do not call when planning recklessness. While my peers raged at parties, drinking and flirting and dancing in two inches of beer, I might be burrowed in the library, learning the rules of supply and demand or pondering a Micronesian ethnography. And if I had ever been naked in front of another human being in my adult life, it was completely by accident. My curves and planes were still my secrets, closely guarded.

And yet I was growing tired of listening to friends swap stories of wild nights and fearsome self-dares. Somewhere deep within my controlled self, curiosity bloomed: I wondered how it felt to revel in the act of being stupid. The notion that I might run in the Nude Olympics, that I might be able to override all instincts and romp naked before hundreds of friends and strangers, seemed more than a lapse in propriety -- it seemed a perfect inversion of my character.

And so I found myself, just minutes before the witching hour on a snowy night in February, packed in a roomful of humid bodies and battling panic even as I tugged off my own clothes. I folded them, as if neatness somehow matters when you're standing naked on the verge of the unimaginable, and double-knotted my shoelaces. The roar of my blood matched the roar of the frenzied crowd awaiting us. Softly, I began my mantra -- ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod -- and willed myself to go numb.

From somewhere remote the Olympic theme blared -- a nice touch, was my last hysterical thought -- and we all pressed for the doorway. The first blast of cold air hit me with a rush. All I could do was run.

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