THUNDER BAY -- An extremely humid Saturday only made things better for the fitness junkies who came out to the Matterhorn Madness challenge at Mount Baldy.
“It’s a sickness,” said Michael O’Connor who spent two-and-a-half hours running up and down Mount Baldy.
The race is in its fourth year, and acts as a fundraiser for local charity Roots to Harvest.
The challenge: race up and down Mount Baldy twelve times, for a total of 1,600 metres, in four hours.
The race can be completed in teams or individually. As long as the magic number 12 is reached.
“That’s the equivalent distance from the base of the Matterhorn to the peak,” explained executive director of Roots to Harvest Erin Beagle, referring to the 4,478-metre mountain located in the Swiss Alps.
O’Connor did it all by himself on Saturday.
“It’s a world of hurt,” O’Connor, who runs in the Lakehead Masters club said. “I run trail marathons, so this develops some mental fortitude, and gets your head around mental fortitude.”
Shelly Brown isn’t a marathon runner, but she is surrounded by like-minded friends who believe in the importance of fitness.
Brown competed with Six Pack and Team Limitless, a group of women aged 50-and-over. Living proof that age is only a number, the oldest competitor for on Saturday was 78 years old.
“We are limitless... we are. We can do anything.”
Six of the competitors are testing that theory when they travel to Peru to climb Machu Picchu later this year.
For now, Mount Baldy will act as the preliminary.
“It’s something that’s totally different,” said Beagle. “It’s not a trail run, it’s not a running race… It’s something that doesn’t exist in the same place anywhere else. So people that want a challenge or something different, do it.”
“You’re out in nature,” O’Connor said. “There’s camaraderie, you aren’t just on the road with your headphones on.”
And for a great cause.
The event is expected to raise between $7- to 8-thousand dollars for Roots to Harvest.
