RIVERTON, Man. – Jason Friesen likes doing things the hard way.
He rode 7,800 kilometres across Canada this summer on a big, heavy, inefficient mountain bike rather than a sleek and quick road bike.
And his goal for the future is to take over the family organic bakery and pizza operation on a farm kilometres from the nearest town and more than an hour’s drive from the nearest city.
Friesen, who is 20 years old, acknowledges that some of his choices strike others as unusual.
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“It is rather crazy,” he said one recent fall day as he cleaned up after cooking a dozen pizzas in the family’s kiln-like oven.
But Friesen is committed to his dreams and seems to take difficulties as challenges to be faced. His ride this summer was part of the Canadian Bible Society’s Bike For Bibles fundraising campaign, which hopes to raise $500,000 by the end of 2006.
He raised more than $3,000. The charity provides free Bibles to people around the world and helps translate the Bible into a variety of languages.
Friesen was one of three riders on the ride who used a mountain bike and the only mountain bike rider to complete the course.
He chose to ride a mountain bike rather than a road bike because that was what he had and what he was used to racing in British Columbia.
He didn’t care that it was about seven kilograms heavier than the road bikes his companions rode and wasn’t designed for windy days struggling across the Prairies and the Canadian shield.
“I found it comfortable,” he said.
Friesen’s family operates an organic bakery near Riverton in Manitoba’s Interlake region.
The family specializes in making bread from spelt and kamut, which it supplies to organic and health food stores in Winnipeg and beyond.
On Friday nights the family works together to make and cook pizzas. Customers include Riverton residents and cottagers who stop at the farm on their way to Lake Winnipeg for the weekend.
Friesen spent last year at a Bible college in British Columbia and hopes to take a year of business courses to help him prepare to run the business.
He would also like to spend a year in California working for one of the micro-bakeries that are common there, learning “the tricks of the trade.”
His goal is to take over the family bakery business when his parents retire.
“It’s my dream to continue the business.”
Friesen decided to bike across Canada a couple of years ago when he was on a ferry on the East Coast and met a man who had just cycled from Vancouver. The man had graduated from school in the West and was arriving in the East to begin work as a nurse.
“He seemed like an ordinary guy. I’m an ordinary guy. Maybe I can do it too, I thought.”
Friesen may cycle across Canada again, if his business and bakery studies and his work on the family pizza farm allow. But he isn’t committing to do it again on an unnecessarily heavy mountain bike.
“Maybe next time I’ll do it on a road bike,” he said.
