While most of Sudbury will spend this weekend celebrating Canada's 149th birthday, five local women will be testing their mettle in the Northern Ontario Regionals of the Canadian FireFit Championships.
Sarah Brosha, Tammy Joyce, Laura Amyot, Nicole Brabant and Kerry McCallum are all volunteer firefighters with Station 15 in Val Caron.
On Sunday, they'll make up a team that will test themselves in the firefit challenge at Wasaga Beach. It's a competition where participants are required to race up several flights of stairs, hoist a hose up the side of those stairs, simulate a forced entry, use a charged hose to hit a target, and drag a 175-pound dummy over 100 feet to the finish line.
A lot of people who take on the challenge do it individually. For the ladies of Fire Station 15, they'll do it in a relay format.
Brosha will tackle climbing the six flights of stairs. Joyce will haul up the 45-pound hose. Amyot will take care of the forced entry simulation. Brabant will sprint around pylons to grab a charged hose and hit a target, while McCallum finished off the event by carrying the dummy.
And, while they've going hard for the past five weeks in preparation for Sunday's challenge, this isn't their first time these ladies have trained together.
“We were all training together already, and we were getting along really well, so we decided to try this challenge,” said Brosha.
They started off training in their back yards, flipping tires and doing chinups, she said. Then they moved to Adanac Ski Hill to run the hills. Then the City of Greater Sudbury offered them the training grounds at the Lionel E. Lalonde Centre in Azilda, which has a tower.
It's a much better simulation of the actual course, Brosha said.
“We've been out here about three times a week for the last five weeks,” she said. “We're all amazed at how doing this has put us in much better shape. Our cardio and strength has increased, and it helps in our firefighting.”
All five ladies are moms, and their training is a huge time commitment, but they have very understanding families, Brosha said.
“We love what we do, and we find it in ourselves to get out here every day and give it 100 per cent,” she said. “We motivate and push each other so much.”
And, while they are all nervous for Sunday's big event, they're also looking forward to seeing if they have what it takes.
“We're looking forward to finally being able to do what we've been practising so hard for,” Brosha said. “We've heard nothing but amazing things about these competitions.”
Their best time is 2:20, “and we're pretty amazed with that,” Brosha said.
“We're going to give it all we have. I think we're pretty tough, and for a first-time team, I think we're going to do really well. I think we'll surprise a lot of people.”
