National Bike Challenge – Log your miles starting May 1st!

The National Bike Challenge starts now! Sign up today and start logging your miles. Put in Tempe Bicycle Action Group as your organization when you sign up. Then create your own personal team and encourage your friends to join too.

From the League of American Bicyclists:

The National Bike Challenge is a new, nationwide initiative to inspire and empower millions of Americans to ride their bikes for transportation, recreation and better health. The friendly, online competition — sponsored by the League of American Bicyclists, Bikes Belong, Endomondo and the Kimberly-Clark Corporation — kicks off today, May 1, and runs until August 31, 2012.

The goal: To unite 50,000 bicyclists to ride 10 million miles in communities across America.

The Challenge is simple, free and open to everyone. Sign up as an individual or as a team, log your miles, share your stories and encourage others to join you. Smartphones users can download the free, GPS-enabled Endomondo mobile app to record travel distance and automatically upload their miles. Riders will compete for prizes and awards on the local and national level, including a Grand Prize trip through California wine country from Trek Travel.

The National Bike Challenge is a great opportunity to make a statement about the impact of cycling nationwide. We’ve already logged nearly a million miles in the warm-up period. Our four-month Challenge goal is 10 million miles, which would be an awesome testament to the role of cycling in transportation and recreation, one that cycling advocates can use in advocating for better laws to protect cyclists, or new investments in infrastructure. If cycling is already a major part of your life, your miles will help us get to our goal more quickly, and make our case more forcefully.

We’ll also be tracking miles by state and community. Your miles logged for Springfield will help keep Shelbyville humble. (Here are a few real-life rivalries to watch —Pittsburgh vs. Cleveland, Georgia vs. South Carolina, and Wisconsin vs. all comers.)