Man skates for 19 hours and 26 minutes for Alzheimer’s awareness

At 5 p.m. Wednesday, dressed in his AC/DC hat and pants, his Reebok pump skates and a custom-made sweater signed by everyone he met along the way, Steve McNeil stepped on the ice at the Cameco Meewasin skating rink in downtown Saskatoon.

That’s where he will stay for 19 hours and 26 minutes until he steps off and goes down the block to Hudson’s for his ritual post-skate steak dinner.

This is the seventh year that McNeil has done a marathon skate to raise money and awareness for Alzheimer’s research.

“My mother battled Alzheimer’s for the better part of 20 years and I thought it would be a nice tribute to her,” said McNeil  about how he chose 19:26, his mother’s birth year.

“I do this in memory of my mother but it’s grown into what it is now, and this is fantastic. This is what it’s all about, all the awareness.”

He did his first skate in 2012 as a tribute to his mother’s battle. After she passed away in early 2013, McNeil’s friends convinced him to turn it into a fundraiser.

It started out just in Toronto, but last year he took his fundraiser to all seven of Canada’s NHL cities. But he “didn’t feel like he did Canada successfully,” so this year he decided to expand to all ten provinces.

Saskatoon is stop number six of 12 for McNeil this year. He has already done a skate in Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary, where it was -29 C for his skate last week.

“So I start right here, now in Saskatoon. Saturday I step on the the ice in Winnipeg at the forks and at the end of the month I am in Montreal at Maisonneuve Park,” he said.

According to McNeil, three brothers are going to attempt to skate the entire 19 hours with him in Montreal. However, he expects only one of them to make it the whole way because of the demanding nature of the skate.

“Four and five in the morning is especially a hard time because you are by yourself (and) the mind starts to get fatigued. That’s when the AC/DC really comes in handy,” said McNeil about the boost he gets from listening to his favourite band for the entirety of his skates.

He started listening to AC/DC during his skates years ago as a musical tribute to Malcolm Young after the band member was diagnosed with dementia.

Last year the band got wind of what McNeil was doing and donated $19,260 to the Alzheimer Society’s Music Project in Canada.

This year McNeil is aiming even higher than the approximately $71,000 he raised last year.

“My goal is to raise $100,000 this year doing what I do. If I can get 5,000 people to donate $19.26, that’s almost 100,000 right there,” he said.

“I think I’m probably 20 or 30 per cent there right now. I know Toronto is at almost $15,000 alone and no communities want to lose to Toronto so I’m pretty sure every community is going to want to beat them.”

On his website McNeil has separate links for donations in each of the cities he visits. He said every dollar he raises goes to the Alzheimer society in the province it was raised.