Staff photo.
Ana Ruzevic is a Vestavia Hills fire medic who is hoping to win her third U.S. National Firefighter Challenge Championship in September.
Ana Ruzevic, a Vestavia Hills fire medic, twice has won the U.S. National Firefighter Challenge Championship, and she’s hoping she can pull it off again in Hoover in September.
The national competition this year is scheduled to take place Sept. 25-28 in the parking lot at Hoover Metropolitan Stadium — the second straight year at the Hoover Met.
Ruzevic qualified for nationals on July 27 by placing second in her age division and third place overall for women in the Northeast Regional for the Firefighter Challenge in Exton, Pennsylvania.
The Firefighter Challenge, labeled by firefighters as the “toughest two minutes in sports,” is an event in which firefighters compete against each other by simulating the physical demands of real-life firefighting. Competitors wear full gear and self-contained breathing apparatuses and perform tasks such as carrying a high-rise pack upstairs, advancing a charged hoseline and dragging a 175-pound mannequin for 100 feet.
At the Northeast Regional, Ruzevic came in second behind Sarah McGill of the Lexington Fire Department in Kentucky in the division for women under age 40. McGill completed the course in 2 minutes, 18.64 seconds, and Ruzevic finished the course in 2 minutes, 28.02 seconds.
Ruzevic’s time was just 4 seconds more than her personal best of 2 minutes, 24 seconds in 2021. She was the national champion in 2019, her first full year to compete in the competitions, and again in 2021. Last year, she and McGill were world champions as partners in the tandem competition.
Ruzevic and McGill are good friends and train together once a month.
Ruzevic said she’s had a lot of things going on in her life and she wasn’t sure she was going to be able to make the Northeast Regional in Pennsylvania, but it worked out so she could be there.
“When I don’t think that I’m going to do well, those are the times I do really well,” she said. “My goal was just to go out there and have fun and see everybody. It was really great to see everybody, and I handled the course better than I thought I would.”
Ruzevic, who is 35, has been with the Vestavia Hills Fire Department since January 2018 and works part-time with the Center Point Fire Department.
Last year, 127 firefighters from 52 fire departments in 25 states participated in the national championship event in Hoover, said Russell Jackson, a former Hoover firefighter who is CEO of the First Responder Institute, which organizes the event.
Participants will be divided into developmental, competitive and pro divisions and will compete in brackets based on age and gender.
Firefighters must qualify at regional events across the country to compete at the national competition.
The day before the national competition, on Tuesday, Sept. 24, there will be a challenge event just for Alabama firefighters. Last year, 73 Alabama firefighters from 15 traditional fire departments and an Army Reserve team took part, Jackson said.
The national competition starts with qualifying rounds for individual competitors on Wednesday and Thursday. The tandem (two-person) and relay (five-person) competitions are Thursday and Friday, and individual championships will be Saturday morning.
The competitions will be in the parking lot in front of the Hoover Met, with the competition course taking up an area 260 feet long by 150 feet wide, Jackson said. The public is invited to watch the competitions for free, but they also will be streamed online so the firefighters’ friends and families back home can watch. Last year’s national competition drew 1.2 million viewers, he said.
Last year’s overall male champion was Jared Johnson, a 36-year-old firefighter from Austin, Texas, who won his fourth national championship completing the course in 1 minute, 19.47 seconds — about 5 seconds shy of the world record. The second-place finisher was Jake Lanier, 36, of the Pelham Fire Department, who was about half a second behind Johnson and who was world champion in 2019.
The top female winner last year was Brittany Hoffman of Wheeling, West Virginia, with a time of 2 minutes, 13.88 seconds.
