Alumni to cycle across Canada

[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/cardiochallenge.jpg” caption=”Duane Vaughan, Steve Taylor and Brett Taylor will spend the summer cycling across Canada raising awareness for the Heart and Stroke Foundation.”]
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Think your bike ride into campus is tough? Try being one of these guys.
Friends since their days as residence roommates in Brandon Hall, Duane Vaughan and
Brett Taylor, together with Brett's father Steve, are set to begin a ride that will take the
entire summer to complete: 10,000 kilometres from Vancouver, B.C. to St. John's, Nfld. In
support of the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, the cross-country trip is meant to
raise awareness about how easy it is to get active while promoting the benefits of exercise
in preventing cardiovascular disease.
"It's going to be tough, but we've been training for awhile and we have great support,"
said Vaughan. "What's important, though, is that we show people that their options are
endless when it comes to getting active - it doesn't have to be as hard as biking across the
country."
The elder Taylor, a family doctor and assistant clinical professor in the Department of
Family Medicine in the Faculty of Health Sciences, says that cardiovascular disease remains
a serious threat to Canadians' health.
"It was one of the top killers when I began practicing and it is still the number one
cause of death and disability in the country," he said. "We want to do our part to change
that."
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The trip is scheduled to begin May 9, when the trio will leave Vancouver and spend a
week cycling more than 600 km to Port Hardy. It is tentatively scheduled to end August 31
after they traverse the 900 km between Port aux Basques and St. John's.
"We just hope we're all still talking to each other by the end of it," joked Taylor.
The three have already raised more than $13,000 for the Heart and Stroke Foundation,
an organization that funds a number of McMaster research projects, and encourage
supporters to visit their
href="http://www.crosscanadacardiochallenge.com/">website to pledge to get more
active.
You can follow the cyclists throughout their journey on
href="http://twitter.com/CardioChallenge">Twitter, or on their blog, found on their
website.
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