FOR ALL THE CHEESE: Island runner takes the title at Canadian Cheese Rolling Festival

Published 11:49 am Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Rebecca Sharar’s years-long quest for the sweet taste of victory ended at the bumpy bottom of a cold and wet ski slope on Blackcomb Mountain.

Turns out, victory tastes a lot like cheddar.

Sharar was the first-place and Grand Champion winner in the eighth annual Canadian Cheese Rolling Festival in Whistler, British Columbia.

The highly competitive race is just like it sounds: wild, wacky and unpredictable. Runners, divided into men’s and women’s races, chase an 11-pound wheel of cheese down a ski slope in an always futile effort to snatch the cheese.

The first one to the bottom wins.

“It’s physically impossible to catch the cheese,” Sharar said.

But the frantic and frightening race is familiar ground for Sharar.

“Five years ago, we stumbled upon this event. We thought it was really quirky and hilarious,” she said.

Sharar competed that first year with fellow islander Laura Chipman and made it to the finals.

“We vowed to come back,” she said.

Sharar has now run in the race four other times and advanced every time to the finals, dubbed “The Race of Champions,” without winning the crown.

This year, though, she became the first American ever to win the race. Canadians have dominated the race in the past, though previous champs have also come from Australia, England, New Zealand and the Czech Republic.

Sharar is a member of the Bainbridge High Class of 2010 and a 2014 University of Washington graduate who is currently a graduate student in public health at the University of Michigan. She said there’s no real way to train for the race.

“It’s all about embracing gravity in the moment,” she said.

“You’re kind of walking a line between speed and balance and control,” Sharar said. “You can’t stay on your feet. People are falling the whole way.”

The race has few rules; runners wear helmets and protective gear but must be over the age of 19, or as Sharar puts it: “Old enough to race but young enough to not have good judgment and not race.”

This year, runners pursued an 11-pound wheel of Boerenkaas cheese, made by Natural Pastures Cheese Company, a dairy farm on Vancouver Island.

While the course may not look like much from the bottom, at the top of the mountain, it’s a different story.

“It’s rather terrifying. The most dangerous part is just falling,” she said.

In her championship race, Sharar wiped out at the end and fell across the finish line, narrowly edging the second-place winner.

She landed on her head.

“I dove forward over the line because I was neck-and-neck with a girl,” Sharar recalled.

“I hit my head pretty hard,” she said, and added that she didn’t realize she had finished first.

“They told me to stay down. But I heard I won and jumped up and started screaming.”

Conking her noggin may have cost her something, but it wasn’t the championship.

“I may have lost a few brain cells,” Sharar said.

The new champ admitted that, beyond wheels of cheese, she’s never chased a food product downhill before, though she did play with her food as a child.

And when asked if she felt a bit out of place on Bainbridge as a world-class cheese-rolling athlete — given that the city banned cheese during last year’s NFL football playoffs — Sharar laughed and said not really.

Beyond the title, Sharar also got to take home the wheel of cheese she chased down the mountain, as well as a one-year ski pass for two at Whistler.

The cheese was a bit banged up.

Truth be told, Sharar said, cheese usually doesn’t knock her off her feet. She said she was really in the race for the ski passes.

Boerenkaas? She’d never heard of that before.

Still, she brought her prize home to Bainbridge Island last week and, with some help, has been nibbling away at her cheesy trophy. Tastes kind of like cheddar, she added.

“Every night my friends have been coming over to my house and having cheese and crackers, grilled cheese, anything you can make with cheese. There’s still some left,” she laughed.

Of course, she’s heard her share of cheese jokes since others have learned of her big victory; some gouda, some not.

Sharar left Canada as another winner, too.

Along with Chipman, Katie Bayer, Mary Forbes and Lydia Fulton, they won the best cheese costume contest and took home a $250 gift card. Forbes and Chipman are also 2010 BHS grads.

Each member of the group dressed as a type of cheese.

One dressed as a goat (goat cheese, get it?); another in a wedge emblazoned with a Swiss flag; another put on a cardboard cottage (that would be cottage cheese, of course); while another wore a blue tye-die get-up with a big blue tear coming down her cheek (sad, as in, blue cheese).

“I was string cheese. I had strings hanging off me everywhere,” Sharar said.

Sharar said she’s not ready to retire from her cheese-chasing career.

“No one has ever won twice, so I now have a new goal,” she said. “We’ll be back.”