Showdown a scorcher
Cops test their limits
Royal New Zealand Police College physical training instructor Steph Bradley toughed it out into second place at The Longest Day, a brutal test of strength and endurance.
The event was held in Lower Hutt on March 9, starting with a 5km run from Melling Bridge down the River Trail to Hutt Park, before a series of challenges, testing strength, coordination and endurance.
Bradley took silver in the women’s section, bested by nuggety Australian Federal Police New South Wales officer Christie Anderson. Lower Hutt police constable Daniel Turner was the overall winner.
Downtown shoppers lined the footpaths of Margaret St to watch the final throes of the competition, the second-to-last event in the week- long Australasian Police and Emergency Services Games.
Organiser Matt Dyson, from Lower Hutt’s Mad Cross- fit Gym, said some competitors set a ‘‘scorching’’ pace, with two, Turner and firefighter James Sharp, crossing the line within seconds of each other in just over 23 minutes.
‘‘ We’d only just marshalls into place.’’
Other challenges such as swimming, indoor rowing and a push-ups contest all led to the showdown in Margaret St.
In the final medal hunt, eight open men’s competitors had been whittled down to four – all of them from Lower Hutt: Turner, 25, Sharp 27, Nick Hale, 31, a quarantine inspector and Craig Wallace, 38, a fisheries
got
the officer. Wallace was out after the ‘‘Jerry Can Suicide’’ event, a running race with 20kg cans placed at 20m, 40m and 60m to retrieve and carry to the finish line. Hale was the next to go, taking the bronze medal after narrowly dipping out in a horizontal haul of a truck tyre piled with a 20kg weight and 12kg sandbag.
With barely time to catch their breath, the police constable and firefighter slugged it out for gold and silver in another carrying race involving the tyre, jerry can, weights, wheelbarrow and sandbag. Turner crossed first, despite a valiant sprint by Sharp at the finish.
It was a great advertisement for the Mad Cross- fit gym, where Turner said weight and endurance exercises with rope and everyday [heavy] objects is grist to the mill.
He said those kinds of exercises had helped him radically improve his times in the police fitness training tests, ‘‘and do my job better’’.
Sharp said the Longest Day events featured similar strength and cardio exercises to the Fire Service’s Combat Challenge.
‘‘They’re designed to push you physically and mentally.’’
An Aussie v Kiwi netball match at Walter Nash stadium later in the afternoon was the last games event.