Formerly the combat challenge, the champs feature a series of gut-busting tasks firefighters typically face while wearing full bunker gear and breathing apparatus.
Claire Jones, 37, who finished fourth-fastest under-40 woman at last year’s champs, in Florida, in the US, qualified for the final and finished eighth in a personal best of 2 minutes 18 seconds.
"That time would have got me third last year," she says.
She’d probably have gone even faster if she hadn’t picked up a hamstring niggle two months out.
Though he didn’t qualify for the final, Sam Stafford-Bush, 35, who’d won the Otago/Southland regional comp, was over the moon to achieve his aim of making the ‘Lion’s Den’ by breaking 1 minute 40 seconds, which he did with almost five seconds tospare.
Only just over 60 Kiwi firefighters have made the Lion’s Den, and only three from Otago/Southland — Jones is one of the other two.
Stafford-Bush and Jones also teamed up in Tennessee to finish 12th in the co-ed tandem challenge.
Queenstown’s third competitor, Aoife Sheehan, 30, who went over for the experience and because she wanted to see Nashville, was also stoked to complete the course for the first time — dragging an 82kg dummy 40 metres had proved her undoing in the past.
