Fitness in the Okanagan: Running, Group Workouts, Yoga, and Wellness Workshops
For this project, my vision was to empower a community through connectiveness and activity and growing the community while reuniting as a whole. While fitness and health are a major component to my life, my ultimate goal is to help others in our community become healthy, active, and want to join these fun activities in the community, without a cost. As our world is becoming so expensive, I think activity is important to relieve stress not only physically and mentally, but financially too.
The project this year was well-rounded with many activities planned including hiking, running, walking, Zoom workouts, group workouts outdoors, and also mental health mindfulness on Zoom. Doing a combination of these activities helped both mental and physical aspects of health, and also helped re-gain that connection we have been missing with interaction since COVID-19.
Overall, I now know what I can improve on immensely with these events and hope that I can always continue to make an impact for our community. I want to secure more attendees, and help others reach their running or distance goals. There was a lot of interest in events, but once the time came, only a few attendees seemed to show up even though many confirmed, and I hope to provide even more incentives next year. What I did notice was more prominence to do workout challenges online, and do zoom workouts and join the mindfulness call.
I advertised weekly on social media and a lot of it was through word-of-mouth in person with friends and at my job, as well as at the grocery store and local gym to try to encourage others to join. I also posted in a Facebook group to plan runs this summer too.
Hiking – weekly / bi-weekly
– Kalamalka Provincial Park
– Ellison Provincial Park
– Predator Ridge
– Even took out a trip to Revelstoke Provincial Park with 4 attendees
Led hikes in these parks to help others in the community realize the beauty we have surrounding us. Offered hikes in the mornings to avoid the heat and before it got busy. Was very peaceful but I think if I were to do it again, I would offer the hikes in the middle of the day or afternoon so that more people could attend. I would like to offer workouts at the Predator Ridge Platform to encourage more people to come out as well.
Running – weekly
– Okanagan Rail Trail
– Kalamalka Provincial Park
Offered runs of 5 KM distances on the trail for all fitness levels in the mornings of the summer up until the end of September. 4-9 people came out at a time and more were interested, but unfortunately cancelled. I would love to make it more of an event and get the whole community involved.
Walking – daily but advertised weekly
– I motivated all individuals in our workout groups, running, hiking, and on Zoom to obtain over 10.000 steps daily and if they did, they would get a small prize at the next event they attended.
Zoom workouts and mindfulness – once weekly
– Most successful as more people attended this, although many people didn’t want to put their cameras on the call. Workouts were low-impact based and timed for 1 – 1.5 hours.
– Did mental health help and helped others with journal entries to be more present and start their days off well.
– The journal entries included
o Things people woke up to be thankful for
o Three things they could have done better yesterday
o Three things they want to work towards
o Three things that make them feel grateful to be where they are right now
Challenges – month long
Challenges throughout these activities included that people would commit to activities and cancel last minute, which caused a little bit of a shift in schedule but I was able to make a good workout challenge and offer prizes to individuals who won along with offer prizes to those who committed to capitalizing on kilometres in running.
I hope to even make this more of a success in the future and help those in the Okanagan become healthy and happy while enjoying the beautiful scenery around us! It’s a great opportunity to try to plan these events and reflect.
Project Leader: Bianca Taylor
