The Budapest-Marseille-Wuppertal collaboration computed the leading hadronic vacuum polarization contribution to the anomalous muon magnetic moment with unprecedented accuracy on the lattice. The result was obtained using staggered fermions. Here we present an improved crosscheck of the staggered result for the intermediate window observable using a mixed action setup: overlap valence quarks on staggered sea ensembles. We focus on the light connected contribution. Details of the overlap fermion formulation and of the methods used for the measurements of the hadronic vacuum polarization are described. We present first results for two different setups on lattices with a spatial extent of 3 fm.