Bertha Kennedy students went for a stroll with the mayor this week as they set off on their metaphorical walk across Canada.
About 251 Bertha Kennedy elementary students went for a walk with Mayor Nolan Crouse Thursday to kick off the school's Walk Across Canada event. The event, which is meant to encourage youth fitness, challenges the students to collectively walk the distance from Cape Spear, N.L., to St. Albert before the end of the school year on June 27.
That's about 6,000 kilometres, or about 12 million steps, said teacher Dolores Andressen, who co-organized the event.
"If we do have extra time, we'll go right to the coast to Victoria and come back."
Crouse fired up the kids with a speech in the school gymnasium and led them through a warm-up march to the tune of "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" (a.k.a. "I Would Walk 500 Miles") by The Proclaimers.
"Are you ready to start walking?" cried Crouse.
"YEAH!" said the kids.
Step up for fitness
The fitness campaign is part of an ongoing "Healthy BobKats" (the school's mascot is a bobcat) initiative at the school, one that has previously had kids jump rope to raise money for the Heart & Stroke Foundation and run in the recent RunWild marathon, says teacher and co-organizer Cathy Traynor.
Staff and students at Bertha Kennedy have received pedometers from the federal ParticipACTION program to wear for the rest of the school year, Traynor said. The school will tally up the number of steps logged on the pedometers each week and track the school's collective progress on a map.
"Some of the younger students think we're walking the whole of Canada," she added, with a chuckle, and have asked her questions like, "Where will we stay?"
According to Google Maps, the Bertha Kennedy students will have to walk at least 4,230 kilometres to get from Cape Spear to St. Albert by the straightest route, or about 8,460,462 steps (assuming two steps per metre). If they stick to major roads, they will have to travel about 6,145 kilometres, or 12,290,000 steps.
Traynor and Andressen said they couldn't recall where they got the idea for the cross-continental trek, but say they chose the start point based on Terry Fox's famous national run. Using the map also gives the kids a tangible goal to work towards and a chance to learn about geography.
Why walk
Children should get at least 60 minutes of sweat-inducing activity a day to stay healthy, according to Statistics Canada — equivalent to about 13,500 steps. Just seven per cent of Canadian kids meet this standard, the agency found.
Crouse told the students a bit about his sister, Ann, who died last year of cancer at age 50. "She didn't live a very healthy lifestyle," he said, and told him that she wished she had paid more attention to her health. "The good news is we can all find ways to live healthy lives all our lives."
Andressen and Traynor said they hoped this walk would help students learn healthy fitness habits.
"We tend to think of fitness and activity as, 'you go and play a sport and you're done,'" Traynor notes, but healthy living requires keeping active throughout the day.
Crouse told the students that they had already taken 126,755 steps by the end of their walk Thursday, based on his pedometer, and he encouraged them to keep it up.
"Go jogging, go biking, go running, do whatever you can to keep your heart pumping and your brain working."
Marisa Roaquin, a Grade 6 student at Bertha Kennedy, said she was confident that her school would reach St. Albert before the end of the school year.
"It's important to stay fit so you can live a long time and stay healthy," she said.
