‘It makes me different’: Meet the women breaking world records in lumberjack sports

She discovered she was fast, and her new records prove it. In the Women’s Standing Block category, where an axe is used to speed-chop through an upright, vertical block of wood, she cut through 9in (22.8cm) of white pine in 19.38 seconds. The previous record was 21.17 seconds.

In the Women’s Underhand Chop, where competitors stand on a piece of wood and chop between their feet, she cut through 11in of white pine in 21.28 seconds. The fastest previous time was 24.26.

Urbanova is perhaps the quintessential example of lumberjack sports’ expanding reach, particularly among women. She says that while they are niche in America, they’re nearly unheard of in the Czech Republic.

That is not the case for Meredith Ingbretson, a Hayward native, who also broke a record at the world championships – winning the Women’s Boom Run, where competitors race back and forth across eight linked cedar logs. Her time was 13.78 seconds – less than a second faster than the previous record of 13.98.

She said she’d buckled down in the past year – cutting out alcohol and anything else that “didn’t align” with achieving her long-held goal.

Ingbretson was introduced to lumberjack sports at age three. They are a big part of life in Hayward, which was founded on the timber industry in 1880. It is a place where, as Ingbretson puts it, every resident “has probably been in logrolling lessons at least for one summer”.

She has now been competing in logrolling for 28 years and began sawing and chopping more recently.