Promoting physical activity, five local students from Ecole Notre Dame des Monts (NDM) will push the pedal for a near 600-kilometre bike ride through the Rocky Mountains into British Columbia next week.
The students will cycle in the La Grande Traversée with a group of peers from Quebec on June 14 when they set off at Elevation Place at 9:45 a.m. in a convoy on route to Vancouver.
La Grande Traversée stops at francophone communities across the country and will host 25 conferences to empower youth and their parents to make healthier life choices.
Joining the convoy are NDM Grade 8 students Laurissa Brousseau, Jordan Olsthroorn, and Zachary Goulet, and Grade 9s Éric Ouellette and Eva Poidevin, along with teacher Carine Verly. Their stretch will be from Canmore to Penticton, B.C., about 570 kilometres away, south of Kelowna.
“We’re going to do it in three days; the idea behind the movement is to get people more active and have an active lifestyle. It started with adults and they had to motivate people in schools to do it so,” said Verly.
“You don’t need to be a pro athlete to do this, they just want to encourage people to be more active.”
Preparing for their ride, students Brousseau and Olsthroorn said they are “excited” about the trip. Living next to recreational mountains, they’re familiar with mountain biking, but road bikes are a new experience.
“Last week was the first time I touched a road bike, so we learned how to use the bikes and how they worked,” Oldsthroorn said.
As part of being able to participate on the ride, they had to apply in a letter and explain why they’d make a good candidate for being an ambassador within the francophone community.
Jean-Luc Brassard, an Olympic gold medallist in freestyle skiing, will give a motivational speech at Elevation Place at 8:30 a.m. as spokesperson for La Grande Traversée before the cyclists depart.
