Active Champions

Tim Harvey

Travelled around the planet by bicycles, by foot, in rowboats, canoes, wooden raft and under sail.

What Activities Keep You Fit and Active?
These days I live on Galiano Island where I balance book writing with a range of physical activity. I kayak at least twice a week, which is great for the abs, back and shoulders. I ride my bike daily, and play floor hockey once a week for my team sport fix. I work out twice a week in a gym, where I lift weights and use the rowing machine, and I regularly hike and jog the forest trails on the island.

What Motivated You to Become Active?
In 2004, when I decided to travel the world without using motors. I was motivated to train so that a sudden transition to full days, day after day, of intense exertion wouldn't injure my body. The adventure itself was motivated by a love of outdoor travel, and the desire to promote active living as a fun and healthy way to combat climate change.

At a young age, it was the fun and playful nature of being active that attracted me to sports, but increasingly I find that the mental clarity and holistic health aspect is also a huge motivation. In my early twenties, I tried sea kayaking, and soon I expanded into river paddling and even kayak polo, a.k.a. canoe polo, by far the most fun team sport I've ever played (Vancouverites are welcome to try: www.vancouvercanoepolo.ca). When the adventure bug bit me, I realized that being active and fit was a key to the outdoor experiences that brought multifaceted benefits to my body, mind and spirit. Each activity has its own rewards.

What Did You Do to Become More Active?
In 2004, with my approaching round-the-world adventure, I began jogging along Spanish Banks in Vancouver, where I ran up a long, steep flight of stairs repeatedly. This knocked me into shape very quickly. I also made certain lifestyle decisions, such as being car-free, which forced me to live a bicycle-based lifestyle. Once I grew accustomed to it, I learned to love my trips downtown, or into Kitsilano, from where I was living near 25th and Main. Simply making it to appointments required a workout. When I rigged my bicycle with a device that enabled me to haul just about anything by bicycle - groceries, lumber, you name it - the transition was complete.

I also spent more time with active friends who already had routines like jogging in Queen Elizabeth Park, which became a fun social time to reconnect with friends. All this was training for my Vancouver to Vancouver journey of some 40,000 km, which was the most active period of my life. I hovered around peak fitness for a couple of years, and felt the best I've felt in my life.

How Do You Motivate Yourself to Stay Fit?
Now that I no longer knock off 16-hour cycling days, six days a week, as I did during my global travels, I don't have the continual motivation of reaching the next country or city along my route. So I remind myself that my heart and lungs, my core and my legs are stronger now as a result of the journey, and I feel motivated to maintain that fitness. Every day, I make time for some enjoyable and healthy activity, or often two or three activities during the day. When I reach the top of a hill my heart is beating full strength and my skin is flushed, and I jog from the forest and suddenly face a spectacular view and feel the wind on my skin, I take a mental snapshot, which motivates me to lace up the next day and do it again.

What Are the Benefits of Being Fit For You?
It would be difficult to overstate the benefits of being fit. We have but one life, as far as anyone knows. Fitness is the single best way to increase, exponentially, the quality of our life. Feeling strong, energetic and limber is not about being young, it's about being fit. I feel as good at 29 as I did at age 18. Just knowing that I will be able to continue embracing life and doing the things I love for decades to come gives me a sense of satisfaction. I also know that I am being true to myself. I think I would suffer latent feeling of dissatisfaction if I knew that I was not making the most of being alive, by being fit, and by eating healthy food. Luckily, being fit is not a chore, it is so much fun! That is another great benefit; time spent doing the things I have come to love. Team sports, cycling, paddling - it clears my mind, it puts me in the moment, in the so-called "zone", which is when I feel most alive.

What Are Your Future Fitness Goals?
When I have access to a hot yoga studio I will resume hot yoga for the overall health of my spine, joints and for flexibility. I also want to push my cardio back up to my personal peak level. I will soon start training on a racing road bike. One-armed chin-ups are another goal, but I'm not quite there yet.

Who Are Your Role Models?
Sam Whittingham is the fastest self-propelled human in history, a huge inspiration to me. Without the aid of gravity or wind, he propels himself on a recumbent bicycle at speeds of over 80 km/h for sixty minutes, a world record, and over 130 km/h for a 200 metre sprint, also an all-time world speed record. Sam breaks his own records almost every year, against stiff competition including Olympic medal-winning cyclists, whom he beats handily. Sam is Canada 's great unsung sports hero, and he lives and runs his own BC home-grown bicycle-building company on Quadra Island.

Jonathan Hungerford was a young man who embodied healthy, passionate living and self-improvement through physical training. As a close friend in our university days, I remember the dedication with which Jono battled back from lymphatic cancer and built a powerful physique through hiking, cycling, running, soccer and martial arts. Jono, who started an organic-food delivery business in Vancouver while still in high school, was a leader by example. Although cancer eventual claimed his life at age 21, my memories of Jono's commitment to enriching his life through physical activity, and seizing every day as if it were his last, will forever inspire me.

Hobbies/Interests
The great thing about the activities I enjoy - paddling, hiking and cycling - is that they bring me into spectacular natural settings, where I can engage in my hobbies of photography and filmmaking. I often stumble into unexpected adventures that I later put to writing, another longstanding hobby. I recently started an online blog focussed on active and sustainable living: www.globaljoyride.blogspot.com. Among other things, the site will carry news of my current book and film-making projects which should be in print and on screen in the Fall of 2007, when I aim to launch a bicycle-propelled presentation tour.

Thrills
There is a narrow channel between Gossip Island and Galiano Island 's south end, which opens into the eastern mouth of Active Pass. When a heavy south wind blows, ocean waves stack up in that channel, creating a thrilling and dynamic ride in a sea kayak. There's nothing I love more than paddling into that wind tunnel, leaning low and pulling hard as I work my way upwind, crashing through waves, and then turning around and harnessing their power, surfing as the waves curl around me and the wind howls from behind.

Favourite Things
I love coming in from a jog or a paddle, and sitting down to work, and discovering that my brain is firing twice as effectively, after being nourished with oxygen-rich blood during exercise.

I also enjoy sharing my favourite activities with other people, especially the thrilling ones like kayak surfing, when I can look along a wave and see friends experiencing the same intense thrill that I'm feeling.

Above all, I love to see the swelling number of people embracing active lifestyles that focus on bicycles as a primary mode of transportation. Not only does this make our communities less congested and more liveable, but a transition away from fossil-fuel dependence represents hope for the future of the Earth. I keep my fingers crossed that as awareness of climate change increases, governments will provide greater incentives for people to make the shift to bicycle-based lifestyles.

Favourite Quotes
"When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race." - H.G. Wells

"I love fitness, the health and well-being ... the mental health that it gives you." - Steve Nash, 2007

"It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country ... as you gain by riding a bicycle." - Ernest Hemingway

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