A  workout at Spray Lakes Sawmills Family Sports Centre on Monday (September 9) attracted numerous first responders as well as community members.

The 4th annual, '9/11 Tribute Memorial Workout' featured hundreds of exercises in honour of the 412 emergency response workers that lost their lives on September 11, 2001.

workoutThis year's 9/11 Tribute Memorial Workout.

Acting Lieutenant for Cochrane Fire Services, Jared Wallace, says with the event gaining more attention and coverage, they had their greatest number of participants out this year. "We had a lot of people who regularly attend the Extreme Boot Camp class at the Spray Lakes facility, as well as, a lot of other people that noticed some of the social media posts about the exercises that came out to support as well."

The workout is pretty gruelling, says Wallace, especially with adding more exercises than in previous years. "The intent is to do one exercise for every emergency worker that died on 9/11 in New York. In previous years, we have done 343 exercises representing firefighters that had died, but this year we decided to change that and do 412 representing the number of firefighters, paramedics, and police officers that died that day."

workout in

Wallace says Paramedics, Police Officers, and a Conservation Officer joined the ten firefighters from Cochrane Fire, six from Calgary, and one from up north. While most participants wore shorts and a tank top, Cochrane Firefighters chose to do all 412 exercises dressed in their gear. "The most common comments that I received was; people were having a hard enough time doing the workout on their own, and couldn't imagine doing it in firefighting gear. I am certain most people aren't used to seeing firefighters in their fire gear, working out at the gym; so when they see that, it makes them reflect about their own thoughts and feelings about September 11."

With today being the 18th anniversary of the tragedy that rocked the world, Wallace says emergency responders around the world will never forget. "It is a very similar feeling to November 11. Firefighters, especially, take time on both those days to remember both firefighters and emergency workers that died on September 11 as well as the Veterans that died on November 11."

While, Wallace and the other participating Cochrane firefighters recover from Monday's extreme calorie burn, they are already looking forward to sweating it out again at next year's 9/11 Tribute Memorial Workout. "Hopefully we'll have even a bigger and better turnout from the community."