Couple cycles Canada for Kids Help Phone

Richard Eyram is pushing himself harder than he ever has on a bike this summer — and he's doing it for kids at their worst.

Alongside his wife Pam, the Burlington, Ontario couple are embarking Sunday on a roughly 7,700-kilometre cycling journey from Vancouver to Halifax to raise $100,000 for Kids Help Phone (KHP), the national crisis support service for young people under 30. Richard will ride; Pam will follow in a sprinter van, managing logistics and providing support.

The trek will stretch to Labour Day or beyond, with stops planned throughout rural and remote communities across Canada — places where mental health care access remains scarce and where the couple believes the conversation needs to happen.

Pam is a retired social worker and longtime volunteer crisis responder for KHP. That professional commitment is crystallized by their own lived experience: the couple have two adult children in their late 20s, a generation navigating mental health challenges in a digital world fundamentally different from what their parents faced.

"We had the ability to leave a toxic environment, come home and turn things off in those heated moments," Richard, 55, said. "Youth today, they can never turn it off because everything's hyper social, hyper mobile and everything's in real time. This new digital world is so much different than what we grew up in and we need to address that."

The statistics KHP provided underscore the urgency: one in two young people aged five to 29 struggle with their mental health alone. Roughly 36 per cent of children and youth with a diagnosed mental health condition have needs that are partially or completely unmet. Six million Canadians live in rural or remote communities where mental health care access is significantly harder to reach. In 2025 alone, KHP interacted with young people more than 3.7 million times — through calls, texts, social media, and digital resources. Close to 300,000 of those interactions came from British Columbia.

"People will text in and say what has happened to them that day: that they got into a fight with their mom or that they're so angry that they don't want to go to school," Pam said. "I also might get a text that says, 'ending my life today.'"

Despite the gravity of that work, the couple view the upcoming adventure with ample positivity — as a catalyst for tough conversations and a way to help smaller, more remote communities understand and address gaps in mental health support.

Richard finds himself in a precarious position physically. The entire concept was conceived only in the last year, and he's not an avid cyclist to begin with. The 55-year-old only recently completed multiple rides exceeding 100 kilometres within a seven-day period. His first week on the road will include traversing the Rockies — a particularly gruelling stretch that will demand 4,000 to 6,000 calories burned per day. The couple expect to reach flatter terrain near Medicine Hat, Alberta within a week, after which they'll push at least 100 kilometres per day outside of rest days.

"At this point my confidence physically is quite high, but we're still working through the fuelling side of things in terms of taking on enough," Richard said, his voice trailing off into the practical challenge of sustaining the enormous energy demand ahead.

The journey begins Sunday in Vancouver — a city young people and families across Canada will be following as two ordinary Canadians attempt something extraordinary for the most vulnerable among them.