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B1 · Finding your flow 146 words · 2 min

The Race Where the Cheese Always Wins

Once a year in England, people chase a wheel of cheese down a dangerously steep hill, and the cheese almost always gets there first.

Illustration for The Race Where the Cheese Always Wins

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Nobody has ever caught the cheese. Send this to your most competitive friend. Once a year, on a very steep grass hill in England, someone rolls a large wheel of cheese down the slope, and a crowd of people run after it.

The hill is so steep that most runners cannot stay on their feet. They roll, tumble, and slide most of the way down, ...

The hill is so steep that most runners cannot stay on their feet. They roll, tumble, and slide most of the way down, while the cheese picks up speed fast enough to outrun every single one of them. Whoever crosses the bottom first wins, since actually catching the cheese has never really been possible.

Nobody knows exactly how the tradition began, only that people in the area have written about it for roughly two cent...

Nobody knows exactly how the tradition began, only that people in the area have written about it for roughly two centuries and probably practiced it for longer. Every year, new runners from other countries arrive to try anyway, and every year, the hill wins as often as the humans do.

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