Monday, June 6, 2022

Fun interview with the woman from North Carolina that won the Cooper’s Hill Cheese Roll race

From a long interview by Emma Baccellieri:

before I left the U.S., I rolled down a hill—I went to Dorothea Dix Park, which is a local park by Raleigh, and I rolled down some hills trying to figure out the best way to roll down a hill. And I thought it was fun and all, but like, in comparison to Cooper’s Hill, it was lightweight. There was no comparison. So I actually watched hours of film in the week leading up to the cheese race. Because I wanted to understand their strategies and where they started from and how they rolled. 

Then after that, on Friday, I went to Gloucestershire, went to Cooper’s Hill and did a test run. I didn’t know what to expect at all. But that is not what I expected. It was so much deeper in person than it looks in videos or photos. So I did that, and one of my friends was with me, and I slid around halfway down the hill and then stumbled and tumbled the rest of the way. I didn’t even go full speed—I didn’t want to, because I would have run into the metal casings that they enclosed the hill with, and there were no rugby players there to stop me. Because at the competition, they have rugby players to stop everyone.

...

I just learned that a lot of it, you can’t really control. From Friday to Sunday, I was like, Oh, can it be better? Can I get better?

...

I had no perception of where I was in terms of the hill and how close I was to the finish line. 


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