Valley Parks and Rec walks across Alabama
BY KADIE TAYLOR
THE LAFAYETTE SUN
VALLEY — Valley Parks and Recreation is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Valley Community Center with a fitness challenge for the months of January, February and March where members will aim to walk 215 miles — the distance across Alabama from Meridian, Mississippi to Valley, Alabama.
“Anybody who wants to participate in a challenge can just stop at the front desk here and say, ‘I want to get in on this walk, run across Alabama thing,’ and the front desk will show them the logbook, and then they just pick out an empty page,” said city of Valley Aquatics Manager Bobby Poer. “They’ll write their name and phone number on it, and then it's got about 100 slots of date and miles where they can come in on whatever day and say, ‘Okay, on this day, I did 3.5 miles’ [and record it all].”
Along with creating an initiative to celebrate an exciting anniversary for the Valley Community Center, Poer said the challenge can encourage locals to start the new year off working towards their health and fitness goals.
“I thought it'd be a cool and fun thing for our members, especially at the beginning of the year, when people have the idea of getting back into the swing of things and getting fit,” he said. “It's sort of motivation, because they can come in, write down their mileage every day and then we'll keep them updated every couple of weeks on where everybody's at, because we've got mileage points at different towns and cities coming across the state on the route that we picked that gives us our 215 miles.”
Poer said the free challenge is also a way to encourage locals to join Valley Parks and Rec and enjoy Valley Community Center swag as a fun finish to the virtual cross-state journey.
“We just thought that that would be a big, cool and fun way to encourage our members to get fit and be able to see their progress as they do it,” he said. “We’re doing first-month membership for free this year, with anybody that signs up for a full-year membership, so it all rolls into one to really try to be a little bit of a membership drive, but more so a fun thing for all of our members to participate in. And then there'll be a little bit of 25th anniversary Valley Community Center swag at the end of it for everybody who completes the distance.”
With the challenge having started on Jan. 1, Poer said members are already walking their miles and sharing their excitement and progress with him.
“People are going out of their way to tell me [how many] miles they got today and that they're planning on finishing this challenge,” he said. “It is something that's sort of become a center point for a lot of people — something to be excited about. They get that sense of accomplishment. Anytime that you can give people an opportunity to have that self-motivation and then get that immediate sense of accomplishment, as far as I'm concerned, you're doing a huge service to them and to the community.”
For more information, visit www.cityofvalley.com.
