Pushing drowning stats down with fitness challenge

MURRURUNDI mum Dayna Hynes and her friend and Push 48 co-organiser, Jennifer Sanders decided to start a fitness challenge to purchase swimming lessons for the town’s public school.

With drowning statistics occurring throughout coastal and country areas and as a fitness enthusiast, Ms Hynes envisaged an athletic challenge to fundraise $7000 for the purchase of swimming lessons for Murrurundi Public school, with the backing of Murrurundi Lions Club.

The Push 48 physical and mental endurance challenge required participants to run or walk 6km, every 4 hours for 48 hours. If participants weren’t into running, they could complete 45 mins of exercise every 4 hours instead.

“Even in the country, knowing how to swim is important because people still swim in dams, rivers, and private pools and the statistics for drowning are still too high,” Ms Hynes said.

“Sometimes swim lessons during holiday programs aren’t always accessible to parents because of hours or cost. We wanted to make it so anyone at the school could attend swimming lessons,” she said.

“I heard about this style of challenge overseas and was interested in giving it a go. I’ve always liked fitness for general health and wellbeing and mental health and Jennifer and I exercise quite frequently together so we decided to make it more of a fundraiser challenge,” she said.

Christina Darlington, Murrurundi Public School Principal says funds will provide free swimming lessons for all 48 students from kindergarten to Year 6, regardless of their swimming level.

“These two ladies have done an amazing job.  They’ve worked really hard over the last two months to put this together and the community has been very supportive. For a community that’s been through a lot of hardship themselves, the generosity of the people of Murrurundi continues to flow,” Ms Darlington said.

“The money raised money will go towards expanding our learn to swim program. We already offer 10 days of learn to swim lessons but it’s really not enough. We have issues with students swimming in dams and rivers and swimming is such a vital life skill, we’re happy to be able to provide this extension of swimming lessons. I believe the children here don’t have access to swimming lessons outside of school so we can now employ instructors,” she said.

Though the tallying of the money continues, the target goal of $7000 has been met and likely well exceeded. Altogether 13 participants entered and completed the fitness challenge, a bonus Sunday fun run was held for those who only wanted to do a run during the last leg of the challenge.

“Once we’ve tallied the money and met with the teachers and principal of Murrurundi Public School, we can work out what the swimming program should look like,” Ms Hynde said.

My Hyne praised both the Murrurundi Lions Club and Ms Sanders for their unbridled enthusiasm and support to make the challenge happen.

“We had the fundraising back end work that the Lions Club allowed us to work from and Jennifer is one of those people where if you say, ‘let’s do something’, she just rolls with it. She was very helpful in the groundwork and I helped with the overall organising,” she said.

“The Sunday Fun Run was good with 47 participants and the original 13 who were doing the last leg of the challenge which was a bridge to bridge walk of 2.4k around Murrurundi. We went from the White Hart hotel over to the main bridge on Main Street over to the Swinging Bridge, around to the bowling club bridge and back to the Whitehart.”