Twin Tour: Biking Across Canada

While everyone else in Canada is enjoying the short summer, Lori and Nancy Buchanan, identical twins from Pembroke Ontario but now living in Windsor Ontario and Zurich Switzerland respectively, will be hopping on their bicycles and pedaling an average of 140 kilometers a day to raise money for the Heart and Stroke Foundation. We refer to this fund-raising campaign, which kicks off on March 17th to coincide with our 50th birthdays, as the “If We Can Do It” tour. We are pretty sure we can do it and we hope to convince you that you could do it too.

Lori has been cycling for years, but Nancy didn’t even own a bike until 2009 and in fact did not do much of anything when it came to fitness. Nancy spent most of her time in front of the computer screen at work but that all changed when Lori convinced her to get a road bike and a helmet. By June 2009, she was ready for her first long trip – from Windsor to Westmeath, a distance of just over 900 kilometers. Lori and Nancy completed the Ontario journey in 9 days, and immediately began planning the cross Canada trip that they are undertaking this summer.

For most cyclists, the fight against cancer is the first charity that comes to mind thanks to the Livestrong campaign which Lance Armstrong has so successfully promoted, but for us the Heart and Stroke Foundation was the obvious choice. Lori is a Canadian Research Chair in Psycholinguistics and a Professor of Psychology at the University of Windsor and knows about the devastating affect that a stroke can have on a previously healthy individual. On a more personal note, we lost our father to heart disease when we were fifteen and, at the age of 30, our brother Michael suffered from a heart problem brought on by a virus and the aftermath of that episode was an aneurysm that left him aphasic. Some heart problems, such as that suffered by Michael, cannot be avoided, but good diet and exercise go a long way to promoting heart health, and that is the information that we women hope to pass on either in person or on this blog site as we travel 6300 kilometers on our bicycles.

If you see the us on the road this summer, be sure to wave.

You will recognize us because we will be wearing matching jerseys with the logos of the Heart and Stroke Foundation and a couple of corporate sponsors. We are particularly grateful to the various hotels and motels that have so graciously provided us with a room for the night, and although we wear the Best Western logo on our jerseys, each Best Western is independently owned and so each franchise owner has chosen to support the cause on her/his own. Other hotels and motels along the route have been equally generous. These are motels and hotels in towns where there is no Best Western, or where providing a complimentary room for a particular charity does not fall within the donation scheme of the local Best Western franchise. Nancy, who arranged for the accommodations by telephone and email earlier this year, was surprised by how universal the readiness to help was.

Our goal is to raise at least $20,000 each, and to do this, we will need your help. To make it easy for you, we have a web site where you can make a tax-deductible donation directly to the Heart and Stroke Foundation and if you are interested, you can follow our progress from June 4th to July 27th on this blog. We would love to have you hop on your bike and help us do a few kilometers into or out of your town (see our stops for schedules). If we can do it, you can too!