KEY POINTS:
Olympic gold medallist Hamish Carter yesterday launched a school fitness programme to encourage children to get active and increase interest in the Beijing Olympics.
As part of the launch of the My Greatest Feat, the champion triathlete handed out pedometers to around 300 children at Mt Eden Normal Primary School, which trialled the fitness programme.
So far more than 85,000 children from 1200 schools have registered for the programme, which begins on July 21, three weeks before the start of Olympics.
Carter is confident My Greatest Feat will be a success.
"We went to a school this morning and after an hour, a couple of kids had done 1000 steps, jumps and hops."
Students will use the pedometers to measure how many steps they have taken in a day and then log on to the My Greatest Feat website and see how far their class has travelled.
Classes will attempt to travel the distance of Cape Reinga to Bluff, learning about each region and its famous Olympians.
Carter believes the programme will inspire children to keep fit and track their progress.
"It gives the kids another mechanism to measure their progress, they can go mate against mate, classroom against classroom, or school against school. So then if you put that competitive element in it, even though kids can just do it for fun, they can also have a bit of a rivalry.
"It's just a fun way to keep them active."
As well as encouraging children to keep fit, it is hoped the programme will also teach the children about Olympic history, maths, geography and computer and internet skills.
Teacher Susan Bourke says students had used pedometers three years ago to learn about blood vessels and internal organs, logging on to the internet to see how far they had walked through the human body. It brought the topic to life for the students.
"I found them jumping up and down in class just to get more steps or desperate to run laps at lunchtime."
