The leader of the Iowa Bicycle Coalition is calling on all Iowa cyclists to sign up for the National Bike Challenge and log the miles they ride. Mark Wyatt says Iowa’s placed in the top ten of the competition in previous years and he hopes the state continues its excellent showing this season. “We’re going to be pitting state against state and business against business,” Wyatt says. “It’s a great opportunity to encourage yourself to get out there and ride more often.”
While hundreds of prizes will be awarded monthly to random riders every month, Wyatt says the ultimate gifts are getting in better shape, saving money and helping the environment. “You can win prizes but the most important thing is, it reinforces and makes bicycling become a habit,” Wyatt says. “They’ve done some study on this and when you start to write those things down and start to log them over a period of time, it becomes habit-forming and you just do it automatically.”
The National Bike Challenge has a goal of uniting 50,000 riders across the country to ride 30-million miles — and taking part is free. “It’s easy to do,” Wyatt says. “You can go onto the website and do it in manually and just type in the amount of miles you rode that week or you can use some of the smartphone apps out there like Map My Ride, Endomondo, or Moves, and then you can just hit the ‘start’ button when you go ride and hit the ‘stop’ button when you’re done and it automatically logs your miles for you.”
He says Iowa has a “secret weapon” in this competition, the statewide bike ride known as RAGBRAI. Thousands are training for the annual bike ride across Iowa and they can start logging those miles now. Learn more at: www.nationalbikechallenge.org