Kia ora everyone, we are Eli B and Eli W and we are two of the participants in the 2024 Blue Light Police Challenge. We are going to tell you a little bit about what we got up to.

On Monday morning 18th of March two Woodend School teams ( Team 1 - Eli B, Eli W, Brie B, and Pearl G, Team 2 - Georgie B, Ariya DR, Kayden D, and Nevada A) were sent off to Cowles stadium to compete in this exciting competition. The Blue Light Challenge is a police competition between a bunch of schools around Canterbury, the obstacle is similar to the one police officers complete for fitness training.

When we got there the teams had a quick introduction of what we were going to compete in, and a wide variety of warm-up challenges too. The first warm-up task we did was lifting firefighter equipment, then we moved onto other challenges like: A speed cam to see how fast you ran, and other activities like checking out police equipment etcetera.

There were many tasks and rotations throughout the day, the main challenge (the obstacle course) had the fastest team getting to go to Auckland where they would get to compete again in the national finals. The obstacle course included a wheelie bin run, a sprint around the course, a beam, a gate which two people went over and two went under, a window where you climbed through, a wall that you would help your teammates over, a heavy object that you carried over ten metres, and another wall with bars to push up on.

Overall we had loads of fun and learned heaps about what police use and do to train.