The Great Pie Race

Every March, the small town of Waimara, in New Zealand, holds its most important event of the year: the Great Pie Race. The rules are simple. Runners must complete a five-kilometer course across fields, through a river and up a muddy hill, carrying a hot meat pie in one hand. If you drop your pie, you're out. If you eat it, you're also out, although a lot of people try.

Nuria, a twenty-six-year-old from Zaragoza, was spending a year working on farms in New Zealand. Before the trip, she had worked for five years as a waitress in a busy cafe. She had arrived in Waimara two weeks before the race to help on a sheep farm, and the farmer's wife, Mere, told her about it. "You should enter," Mere said. "It's the funniest day of the year. Nobody takes it seriously... except Bruce."

Bruce was the local champion. He had won the race seven times, and he trained harder than anyone else in town. People said he practiced running with a pie every evening. He was taller, stronger and much more confident than the other runners. When he saw Nuria at the starting line, he smiled politely. "Have you ever carried a pie before?" he asked. "Not really," Nuria answered honestly. "But I've carried a lot of coffee."

Most runners started too fast, and by the end of the first field, several pies were already lying on the grass, where the farm dogs were waiting happily. Nuria ran more slowly than the others at the beginning. She held the pie flat on her open hand, high above her shoulder, exactly like a plate of food in a crowded restaurant. Her arm stayed perfectly still while her legs did the work.

At the river, the stones were slippery and many people fell. Nuria crossed it carefully, and then she realized that only two runners were ahead of her: Bruce and a teenager in a superhero costume. On the muddy hill, the teenager slipped, and his pie rolled all the way down to the bottom. Now it was just Nuria and Bruce.

Bruce climbed the hill faster, but he was getting tired, and he was holding his pie more and more nervously. Nuria kept the same steady pace. With five hundred meters to go, she passed him. The crowd at the finish line went wild. "Who is she?" people shouted. "The Spanish woman from Mere's farm!" Nuria crossed the line eleven seconds ahead of Bruce, with her pie in perfect condition. It was even still warm.

Bruce was the first person to shake her hand. "That was the best pie-carrying I've ever seen," he said, and he sounded completely sincere. "How did you do it?" Nuria shrugged. "Five years of Saturday nights in a cafe in Zaragoza," she said. "Compared to that, this was easy." Then, as tradition says, the winner sat down on the grass and ate her pie. The next week, her photo appeared in the local newspaper under the headline: SPANISH WAITRESS SERVES UP A SURPRISE.