CHEESE ROLLING
EXCERPT FROM TRUE BRITS ©JR DAESCHNER

For sheer lunacy and danger, few events can rival cheese rolling.

If you've never seen it, the ancient Gloucestershire tradition doesn't sound that daunting: a cheese is flung down a hill, and dozens of men chase it.

Initially, I envisaged a wheel of cheese trundling down a long, grassy slope at a leisurely pace. Of course, some runners might take a tumble-that would explain the dozens of injuries every year-but they were probably reckless or just plain clumsy. In my naïveté, I even imagined that I might join in the fun.

But then I saw Cooper's Hill.
From the bottom, the racecourse doesn't seem that dangerous; from the top, it looks suicidal. Rather than a gradual incline, the hill drops away at a near 70-degree angle, then quickly shifts to 50 degrees, then plunges again, then levels out, then falls one last time before abruptly flattening out-leaving runners only a few yards to stop before crashing into a cottage fence at the bottom.

The 250-yard racecourse is a short, sharp drop full of dips, bulges, and any number of perils, seen or unseen: long, ankle-twisting grass; patches of slick, decomposing leaves; gravel outcrops lurking under the turf; tufted islands jutting up unexpectedly; eroded foot-traps masked by grass; not to mention big, fat Roman snails and the odd duck's nest. In short, the hill is a natural obstacle course containing just about every impediment Mother Nature could come up with, making it difficult to walk down, let alone run down.
In fact, the runners don't dare start the race standing; instead, they sit at the starting line before flinging themselves off the ledge.

There are three men's races and one for women. No one ever catches the cheese-it hurtles down at nearly 70 miles an hour. The winner is simply the first runner to hit the bottom of the hill. "People literally fly through the air," says Rob Seex, the current master of ceremonies. "It just looks insane. You will be amazed that people aren't more seriously hurt than they are."

Surprisingly, cheese chasers aren't the only ones at risk. Bystanders have also been hurt-by out-of-control runners ... and bouncing cheeses.

"That's gotta be a bit of a whack," says a cheese chaser whose mother was hit in the leg by a hurtling cheese. "She had a humongous bruise and couldn't walk for a couple of weeks." More recently, a spectator banged his head and fell 100 feet down the slope after trying to dodge a wayward cheese. Fortunately, he didn't suffer the same fate as a fabled bystander from long ago. His epitaph declared: