WSU Student to Bike and Build her Way Across the Country

The next time you find yourself breathless and sweaty after a few miles of biking through our beautiful Northwest landscape, try to imagine yourself undertaking a bike trip across the country. Sounds crazy? Not to WSU Spokane student Elle Flood, who will be doing exactly that this coming summer.

A junior in WSU Spokane’s exercise physiology and metabolism (ExMet) program, Flood will be participating in Bike & Build, an event that takes young adults across the country by bicycle to raise funds for and awareness of affordable housing efforts. 

Flood’s 70-day, 3,736-mile trip will start in Providence, Rhode Island, in early June and will end in Vashon Island, Washington, in mid-August. She will cover anywhere between 30 and 110 miles per day.

As part of the trip, Flood will be presenting about affordable housing issues to residents of communities along the route and will help local housing organizations build affordable homes. Her itinerary, which is one of six Bike & Build routes, includes ten building days. As the only participant from Spokane, she is particularly excited about the building day in Spokane, which will take place on August 7.

To be able to participate, Flood has to raise $4,000 for Bike & Build, which will be used to fund affordable housing projects through donations and a competitive grant program and to garner national media attention for affordable housing issues. “That’s the hard part,” she laughed, noting that the prospect of biking all those miles didn’t seem that bad.

Details on Flood’s planned route can be found at www.bikeandbuild.org. For more information or to arrange for an interview, contact Flood before June 6 or after August 26 at 480-452-9484 or dflood@wsu.edu.

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