Wednesday, April 16, 2014

The National Bike Challenge is back for another year!

It's time once again for the National Bike Challenge! This event was started by the League of American Bicyclists in 2013, and continues bigger and better this year!

The National Bike Challenge runs from May 1 through September 30. Every time you ride your bike, log your miles and earn points for your town, region, team, and company! Every mile you ride counts as 1 point, plus you get 20 bonus points for every ride!

The National Bike Challenge web site is new and improved this year, with support for more ride tracking apps, easier to find and join teams, and better tools for creating and managing groups for your work place. In addition to Endomondo, the site also supports MapMyRide and Moves. So, if you one of those apps to track your bike rides, and link it to your National Bike Challenge profile, your mileage will be logged automatically! If you use another app, or no app at all, then no worries. It's easy to log into your National Bike Challenge account and manually log your rides for full credit.

If you participated in the Challenge last year, keep in mind that this year, the web site is all-new and redesigned, so you'll need to register all over again.

Once you're registered, you can join a team, as well as join a group for your workplace or school. Check with your employer's human resources or health and wellness coordinator to see if they've already set up a group for your company.

Don't have a team of your own? Then join the Century Cycles Team! After you register on the National Bike Challenge web site, just go to the MY ACCOUNT page, click SEARCH under the Team heading, and look for Century Cycles! You'll be helping all of us log those miles for all of our communities in Northeast Ohio!

Best of all, you'll be helping us avenge last year's bitter defeat in the Rust Belt Battle of the Bikes! This local challenge will be in full force again, pitting cyclists in the Cleveland region against those in Pittsburgh. Brought to you by our local bike advocacy organizations, Bike Cleveland and Bike Pittsburgh, this friendly competition shows which metal city has more cycling meddle!

Last year, we were narrowly beat by da 'burgh, and on a technicality, no less. Although we had MORE overall miles, they got more bonus points for a greater number of bike trips! So log every bike ride you take, no matter how big or small! If you don't have time for a regular ride every day, just take a spin around the block and log it! Ride to your mailbox and log it! Stop by one of our stores and test-ride a sweet carbon road bike with electronic shifting and LOG IT!

The new National Bike Challenge web site is at www.nationalbikechallenge.org or www.rustbeltbattle.org! Register today, and start tracking your bike rides!

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