Kate Dixon in the cab, and Holly Hughes, had no time to savour their success on Saturday - it was straight back to Moama where they were on call.
Do the maths.
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It’s barely 100m to the top of the Crown Metropol Tower – but if you take the stairs, well there’s almost 1300 of those.
To get there from Moama, is a 440km round trip.
And when you arrive, you add 25kg of full fire structure turnout gear and join 997 other vertically challenged first responders and start running, jogging, walking, dragging, your way up every one of those stairs and sucking oxygen from the cylinder strapped to your back.
Kate Dixon, left, and Holly Hughes were almost incognito when they hit the stairs running at Crown Metropol.
All in the name of charity, raising money for the Peter MacCallum Cancer foundation, Lifeline and 000.
Which pretty well describes Saturday morning for Moama firefighters Kate Dixon and Holly Hughes, who schlepped down to Melbourne, geared up, charged the staircase and hit the top together 8.07 minutes later (although Holly finished in 7.55, starting 12 seconds behind Kate).
“We hooked up with six flights to go and shared that part of the climb,” Kate explained.
And as well as they went, they were both amazed because they had not done any training.
Instead, they had been winding down after winning the AFL Goulburn Murray Women’s League premiership with their team Shepparton United three weeks ago (by a lazy 60 points thanks very much).
“We kept telling ourselves we would start training after the grand final and suddenly realised we were out of time,” Kate and Holly agreed.
“In fact, if we had planned it better, we would have realised there was never going to be enough time to train at all,” they laughed.
“And nowhere to do it anyway – ever since they pulled down the grandstand at Vic Park there have been no steps at all, and there’s no hills around here.”
Kate was the first female firefighter at the Moama station when she joined six years ago. Holly signed on last year as the second and Megan Fox became the third at the same time.
And Kate and Holly were on call today, so as soon as they got back down the tower, they were back in the car and headed north to report for duty by 4pm – and were then called out for a grassfire an hour or so later.
Hardly your routine weekend day off.
At the same time the pair raised $3160 towards the climb’s $1.07 million total.
“When we were driving down, we were talking about the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy, which was the day before, when 374 firefighters rushed into burning buildings and did not get to come out,” Kate and Holly said.
“We reflected on that and knew no matter how hard we might find it, we would be having fun, helping some good causes and coming home,” they said.
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