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Heloise Lorimer students complete adapted Terry Fox Run initiative

With its traditional run cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Heloise Lorimer School (HLS) was extra creative with its Terry Fox Run this fall.

With its traditional Terry Fox Run cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Heloise Lorimer School was extra creative with its initiative this fall.

According to Adam Pratt, lead physical education teacher for grades 1 to 5, staff designed a “hybrid” Terry Fox Run this year that focused on both donations and wellness. He said students were challenged to raise $2,000 toward cancer research between Oct. 1 and 13, and also undertook a “movement challenge,” which saw students collectively run, walk or cycle a distance of 2,000 kilometres (km) during the same time frame.

"It's kind of honouring Terry's legacy in the fact he said, 'This has to keep going,'” Pratt said. “We figured it’d be cool to make it less about money and to make it more about healthy living and contribute by being active and making healthy choices.”

The students’ distances were recorded during P.E. classes – Pratt said the students were running and moving a lot as part of the school’s track and field unit – and through the Walk and Roll to School program, which encourages students to either walk or cycle to school.

“We just said, 'Raise your hand if you walked or rolled to school today,'" he said. "I used an average of one km because our school is a walk-only school. Some kids live 2.4 km away but some kids live across the road."

The school settled on 2,000 km for the movement challenge because that is the approximate distance from Thunder Bay, Ont. – where Fox was forced to stop his Marathon of Hope in 1980 – to Airdrie, Pratt said.

"It was an approximation, but that was the idea," he said.

By Oct. 13, Pratt said the students had raised a little more than $2,000 and travelled around 2,700 km, successfully accomplishing the two goals.

"According to Google Maps, that would be about 300 kilometres short of the west coast of Canada,” he said.

The challenges had wide buy-in from the student body, according to Pratt. He said every student in grades 1 to 5 contributed to the movement challenge through their P.E. classes, while roughly 75 per cent of the student body contributed additional km by walking or cycling to school.

“We were doing a poll every day to see how many kids were walking or biking to school and that’s how we tracked our km,” Pratt said.

To add a little more incentive, Pratt said he promised his students he would shave his head if they reached the two goals. On Oct. 16, each of his classes throughout the day got to watch as a strip of his hair was shaved off. By the end of the school day, Pratt’s hair was all gone.

“My hair had been growing out since COVID – I only had it cut once – so my hair was getting super long,” he said.

“I told the kids I won’t wear my hat for the next week so they can see it.”

The now-hairless Pratt said this year’s modified Terry Fox Run initiative engaged the students in a more comprehensive way than past iterations and embraced Fox’s running spirit at the same time.

“It got the kids involved in more of a way than just bringing in money," he said. "That's great, and that's, of course, the purpose of the Terry Fox Run and how cancer research moves forward, but I think he was about more than that. He was about wellness, being active, setting a good example, trying your best, working hard and contributing to something bigger than yourself.”

Scott Strasser, AirdrieToday.com
Follow me on Twitter @scottstrasser19

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