There was no shortage of things to do at the Ottawa Outdoor Adventure & Travel Show on earlier this month.
Members of Ottawa’s outdoor sports communities say that getting out and exercising in green spaces is a more effective method of community building than social media.
With Ottawa’s coldest winter in the last two decades on its way out, thousands of people converged on the EY Centre in Nepean for the 2014 Outdoor and Adventure Travel Show on March 15 and 16.
Representatives from both sides of the Ottawa River met with enthusiasts and beginners alike to showcase local outdoor sporting opportunities for this spring and summer.
This show is the first of five put on by Caneast Shows, located on Metcalfe Street, throughout the year.
Show manager Jake Naylor says the show provides a place for people to connect and get excited about the outdoors.
“It’s a cool opportunity at the show for people to talk about getting outdoors and getting off the smartphones and turning off the computer for a couple weeks and hiding out in the bush and letting your brain clear and living life to the fullest,” he says.
Jim Coffey, director of Esprit Whitewater based in Quebec’s Pontiac region, says when people are able to get outdoors with others, it breeds more authentic relationships than those developed through online interactions.
“When you get to be face-to-face with some challenges, being out in the wilderness, whether that’s (with) friends or family or complete strangers just joining together to meet a challenge, that’s where people actually become very connected rather than this strange web of strangers that are trying to link themselves together.”
Based in Hintonburg, the Ottawa Sport & Social Club organizes sports leagues in a 20-km circle radiating out from the downtown area. Marketing manager Mike Hirsch says connecting people together through sport is the reason the OSSC exists. When the OSSC first started in 2003, he says the owner said “if the league started with 250 people and 12 friendships were made and two romantic relationships were formed, it was a great success.”
Erin Hope, owner of Ripple Adventure, another local organization that gets people together to do outdoor sports, says people in Centretown can take their urban sport experiences one step further by using them to cross-train for similar outdoor adventure sports.
One such place is Vertical Reality, the climbing gym on Victoria Island, which she says “translates into actual climbing outdoors. People take the skills that they develop in the gym and then they go out to a bunch of places within about an hour distance from Ottawa to do rock-climbing.”
She also says road cycling can translate into mountain biking on Ottawa’s trails while flatwater canoeists or kayakers on the Rideau Canal can venture into the whitewater sections of the Ottawa River.
Becky Mason, a 25-year veteran canoe instructor with Paddle Canada, says the best way to get people involved is by taking them on a trip.
“If you actually do take them for a little canoe ride for a day, they go ‘this is cool,’ and that’s actually a type of education. If you can educate the public to how beautiful and how enriching it will make their lives, they actually start to care about the surroundings.”