For several years now the MNC Juniors and Collegiate skiers have embarked on a big ski to cap-off the summer season. With a home base at Ferrisburgh Central School and a 20km loop of flat open roads near Kingsland Bay, skiing for a distance of 100 kilometers was often the “target” of the session.
While we’ve altered our event a bit to remove the pressure of needing to complete a whole 100k adventure (especially for our younger Juniors) the excitement around this ski has always remained. We bring tables of snacks, chairs to take breaks on, and there’s always the pull of “one more lap” or “one more out-and-back” just to see how far a skier can challenge themselves.
Relaxing after the first Rollathon (then just the “100km ski”) in 2021
This year, we thought about making this into more of a fundraising opportunity. We took inspiration from events where distance is a goal and participants race funds “per mile” or in this case “per kilometer”. Starting with $0.25 per kilometer as a baseline, skiers reached out to friends and family for pledges of support on a long day.
For a small and lightly-publicized event (for insurance reasons, mainly…more on that below) we had an awesome result, and while the contributions are still coming in and being tallied we look to have raised over $800 for the MNC Scholarship Fund!
The mission begins
Many kilometers in, and Beth and Ava are still having fun!
In future years, we’d love to make this into a real “EVENT” in a broader sense. Volunteers flipping pancakes for a morning snack? Grilling burgers in the afternoon? Prizes for distances, sponsors, and more? The potential is quite large!
In the ski yesterday we had 25 skiers coming together for a total of 1879 kilometers of skiing, or an average of just over 75k per skier. Pretty cool!
You can check out a whole gallery of photos at this link.
Camille displaying the (soon-to-be-iconic?) sticker awarded for skiing 100K…it’s designed after a certain famous car bumper sticker, but this one fits on a rollerski!
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