The subject of mental health hits close to home for Bryan Guetens.

The 22-year-old Montville resident and recent Eastern Connecticut State University graduate hatched a plan a few months ago to go for a bike ride. This wouldn’t be any ordinary bike ride.

Guetens recruited a few friends and The Valley Boys Ride was born.

When Guetens decided to raise money during the trip, picking a charity was easy.

Guetens lost his brother and grandmother to suicide in the last 10 years, so the National Alliance of Mental Illness of Connecticut (NAMI CT) was a natural fit. They just happened to be the first charity to get back to him.

“There is a negative stigma around mental health,” Guetens said. “It seems that you can’t be open about your mental health, and if you are, you’re looked at differently. The message we were trying to send is that you are not alone, and that it’s okay to not be okay. It takes a lot of strength to open up to others about your mental health and to seek help. I believe that if you try and get help, you are strong. It takes a lot of courage for someone to do so.”

Guetens and five friends, all ECSU students or alumni, departed Stamford in late May and arrived in Corolla, North Carolina in the Outer Banks, camping on the beach for their final night of the trip on June 11.

During 13 days of riding covering 600 miles, the group enjoyed stops in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Annapolis and Washington, D.C., raising more than $5,000 for NAMI.

“The whole goal was to spread awareness,” Guetens said. “Wherever we were staying, the further south we got, we’d show our shirts, we would sit and talk to a lot of people and tell them why we were doing it, and listen to peoople talk about mental health. To be able to see a lot of people out there care about mental health, it meant a lot to a lot of people.”

Guetens had never been a big bike rider, but he played hockey and baseball in high school at St. Bernard and continued playing in college, so his natural athleticism took over. Bicycling was something he started when the pandemic hit.

“It was something to do honestly,” said Guetens, who will attend Merrimack College in the fall on a graduate fellowship for strength and conditioning. “Your body goes through a lot when you’re biking 4, 5, 6 hours a day. It doesn’t matter how much you hurt pysically, your mind takes over. Mentally I had to push through it. When you’re 50 miles in, with 15-20 to go, your body starts to shut down, you have to power through it.”

Which sounds like a pretty good analogy for mental health.

“One of the messages that surrounds mental health is, no matter how hard it gets, you have to keep going,” Guetensa said. “Your mind is so fragile, but it’s so strong. It can power you through anything.”