Posts by Alison Dewey

Over the past three years, the League has been privileged to play a pivotal, leadership role in the National Bike Challenge, uniting bicyclists of all abilities and interests to collectively log nearly 100 million miles. The Challenge has shown us the valuable role the League can play in catalyzing a great idea and the immense power in using our national reach to make a difference at the local level. We’re excited to see how the Challenge continues to evolve, as the League shifts to its new strategic plan and new challenges in 2015.

Today we are featuring Jim Silcott, principal extraordinaire and National Bike Challenge rider. Silcott has been an educator for 35 years and is now in his 26th year as principal of Trinity Catholic Elementary school in Columbus, Ohio. He set the impressive goal of riding to school every day no matter what the weather, no matter what he has on his daily schedule and no matter what time he may end his work day. Rain or snow, early arrival or late departure, he is ready to ride and he is recording his miles in the National Bike Challenge for all of us to cheer him on.

The National Bike Challenge is a community-based event focused on people. There are dozens of different reasons to get on your bike and participate. From viewing personal achievements, motivating friends to ride, having fun in the workplace, spending family time, and more, we know the Challenge means something different to all 44,000+ riders. At the League, one very important thing to us is that the Challenge be accessible to everyone, fun for all, and shared across the country.

The National Bike Challenge is full of instant success stories because of its ability to help motivate people to give bicycling a try. We asked Benjamin Lindorf at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) a few questions about their participation in the Challenge. He had some very inspirational stories to share.

We’re just a couple days out from the kick off of the new-and-improved 2014 National Bike Challenge! For months, we’ve been working diligently behind the scenes to create a better website that offers our users an intuitive, functional and inspiring experience. We truly appreciated riders’ understanding and constructive feedback as we phased in functionality and completed development.

We are off to an exciting warm-up period with the new-and-improved National Bike Challenge! We have been working diligently to improve the website and offer our users an intuitive, functional and inspiring website ahead of our May 1 start. As our current user base knows, it’s been a work in progress and we thank you for your patience. We have truly appreciated your understanding and your constructive feedback as we work to phase in functions. Many of you are asking, ‘why the change?’

School is out and summer is upon us, which means more kids on bikes more of the time. So when James Becker, a junior at a nearby high school, wrote and asked if I could help out with a kid’s bike education class, I didn’t hesitate.