Torch bearer

Jen Ronan shows off her Pan Am Games flag in front of the Health Unit in Picton.

Nurse and physical fitness advocate will carry Pan Am torch

On July 3, Jennifer Ronan will check in with Pan Am security in Belleville. She can’t carry anything with her. She’ll be handed shorts, a T-shirt and an armband—the official uniform—and be shuttled to her starting point along a very long route.

There she’ll wait, surrounded by cameras, as the official torch makes its way to her. Once it arrives, a runner will pass it to her, and she’ll be off, running her leg of the Pan American torch relay.

“I’ve always wanted to participate in a lot of the different Olympic torch relays, so I’ve applied for everything. And this is the first time I’ve actually ever even been considered,” says Ronan. “So when I got my email saying I was chosen, I actually didn’t believe it at first.”

Ronan, who studied to become a registered nurse at Queens University, has always been enthusiastic about physical fitness. Her father, Wayne Lindsay, was the principal for the Sophiasburgh school, and a strong proponent of physical activity.

“From a very early age, I was always encouraged to be active, and it just became second nature to me,” says Ronan. “I’ve always been passionate about physical activity.”

It’s what makes her job—she’s responsible for promoting physical activity for the Prince Edward Hastings Health Unit—so fitting. Ronan gets to work with kids—her other career choice would have been teaching—and to carry on her father’s legacy of promoting physical fitness.

It was her enthusiasm for physical fitness that got Ronan on the relay course. It’s a short run. She will have only 200 metres before she passes the torch on to the next community representative.

But Ronan sees her job as being a role model. Those 200 metres will only be a part of her running routine. Last fall she ran her first half marathon, and intends on continuing.

Of course, Ronan recognizes running is not for everyone. She thinks the fact that as a non-athlete running in the torch relay, she’s representing everyone’s need for physical fitness.

“I’m not an athlete, but I love being active, and I think that’s even better,” says Ronan. “Because I think for the majority of people, we’re not athletes. And we need to remember that being active can be walking, it can be playing tennis—it’s jumping on a trampoline with you kid. It’s having fun. So perhaps it’s even better that I’m not an athlete. Then people can say, well, she’s a nurse, and she’s active. And maybe that’s even a better approach to get people on board.”

And that’s paramount to Ronan’s work. Recent studies show long periods of sitting and physical inactivity are second only to tobacco as a preventable cause of deadly illnesses like heart disease and cancer. Her job—her passion—is preventative medicine. She wants to encourage everyone to find a way to stay active and stay healthy.

She hopes the torch relay, and the games themselves, will help.

“I’m over the moon excited,” she says. “I’m hoping that people will get inspired to get outside and try some activity, turn off the TV and go do it themselves.”