Submitted by the Seaway Trail
The Seaway Trail, Foundation is inviting residents of Sackets Harbor and the other 86-some shoreline communities to lead-off the start of the Great Lakes Seaway Trail Volkssport initiative. An organizing meeting for the formation of a Great Lakes Seaway Trailwide Volksmarching Club will be held Friday, January 7 at 3pm at the Great Lakes Seaway Trail Discovery Center in Sackets Harbor, NY.
The new club will apply to be officially sanctioned by the American Volkssport Association to develop a Trailwide system of Volksmarching walks and events.
The Volkssport concept represents the opportunity for all people to engage in healthy activity that encourages fitness. The term encompasses such non-motorized activities as walking – known as Volksmarching, bicycling, swimming, cross-country skiing, and snowshoeing.
“We envision a Trailwide series of Volkssports walks with other volkssports to follow,” says Seaway Trail, Inc. President and CEO Teresa Mitchell.
The Great Lakes Seaway Trail initiative will start with organizing community-based, volunteer-led walking events held in various communities found across the 518-mile-long freshwater shoreline byway in New York and Pennsylvania. The route that runs alongside the St. Lawrence River, Lake Ontario, Niagara River and Lake Erie is federally recognized as a National Recreation Trail and is one of America’s Byways noted for recreational, natural, scenic, historic, cultural and archaeological resources.
Volkssport participants purchase logbooks to record their participation in events and the number of miles they cover. The non-competitive Volksmarching events are usually 3.1 mile (5 km) or 6.2 mile (10km) walks. People can participate as groups, families, with a pet, or alone.
Participants can have their logbooks validated at sanction events and earn pins, patches or souvenir tokens for a certain number of events or distance covered.
“The pace of the Volksmarching walks fits perfectly with the Great Lakes Seaway Trail motto of exploring our byway ‘in your own time, at your own pace, and in your own style’,” Mitchell says.
“If this healthy “let’s get up and move” initiative grabs the public’s attention as much as the Great Lakes Seaway Trail geocaching adventure that began in 2010, we expect to see a similar positive impact on our byway communities Trailwide,” Mitchell adds.
Those from any of the byway’s communities interested in learning more about the Great Lakes Seaway Trail Volkssport initiative may reserve a seat for the meeting by calling 315-646-1000 x200 by January 5, 2010. Learn more about the Great Lakes Seaway Trail byway online at www.seawaytrail.com
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