THE NATIONAL BIKE CHALLENGE 2018

The Challenge Format

We’ve made some improvements to the National Bike Challenge in 2018 to make it more exciting, punchy, and ultimately more successful at encouraging more people to ride, more often.

May 2018 - the National Bike Challenge - join a team (of up to 8 riders) and have some fun  riding and encouraging others to ride too. There are points, leaderboards, and prizes!

September 2018 – Cycle September – your organization competes against others of similar size. Rally your colleagues to ride, anytime, anywhere in September. Earn points to climb the leaderboard.

Year Round and May-September Individual Leaderboards - - you can also use the Love to Ride website (on which the National Bike Challenge is being run) to record your rides and compete on monthly individual leaderboards (e.g. Top Rider, Top Commuter, etc). The League of American Bicyclists will also be giving away some Top Rider awards for the summer riding season (May - September).

How to Earn Points  

You earn points by:

Riding; and
Encouraging others to ride.

Team points are the sum of all of the individual team members’ points.

The points system has been carefully developed, tried and tested, over the last 4 years to ensure a fair and exciting competition, and to strongly encourage teams to engage new riders if they want to secure victory. Here’s how individual points are earned:  

Leaderboards

State vs State leaderboards

Which states can earn the most points by riding and encouraging others to ride?

City vs City / Community vs Community Leaderboard

Which communities/cities/counties can earn the most points by riding and encouraging others to ride? Note that you'll need to have a local site set-up for your area. You or someone else from you area can request a local site is set-up here.

Top Individual Riders

Leaderboards for who are the…

Top Riders – Trips
Top Commuters – Trips
Top Riders – Miles
Top New Riders - Miles

There will be monthly leaderboards and leaderboards for the whole year and for the May-September period as well.

Teams - May

Who are the top teams in each Pool of 10 teams who have earned the most points by riding and encouraging others to ride too.

Workplaces - September

Who are the top workplaces in each of the 7 staff size categories who have earned the most points by riding and by encouraging others to ride too.

Overview – The National Bike Challenge – May 2018

Start a team or join an existing team (or you can ride solo, but it’s more fun with some friends!)
Teams can have up to 8 riders.
Teams can be made-up of anyone – colleagues, friends, family, etc.  
Your team will compete against 9 other teams in your ‘Pool’.
Pools contain 10 teams. Pools mean that each team has a good chance of getting into 1st, 2nd or 3rd place in their Pool of 10 teams. This makes for a more exciting and engaging competition for participants (as opposed to having 1 giant leaderboard where only the teams in the top are motivated to take part and engage, and teams in 78th place are not that engaged or motivated to take part!
Each individual and team will earn points as pictured above. The more points you earn by riding and by encouraging others to ride too, the higher up the leaderboard you’ll go.
There will be winning teams in each Pool. Can you beat the other teams in your Pool to get on the podium?
After the 3rd week of the Challenge, the top teams from each Pool are put into an additional leaderboard called ‘The Final Sprint’ where they'll face all the other top teams from each Pool to see which team is the best of the best! Only the points earned the last 7 days count on this additional leaderboard. Your team will still compete in its Pool the whole month of May. There will be three Final Sprint leaderboards: 1) Total Points; 2) Rider points (only the points earned by riding in the last week) 3) Encourager Points (only the points earned by encouraging others this last week).

Overview - Cycle September - the Workplace Bike Challenge - September 2018

Organizations and their departments will compete against others of the same size (to level the playing field).
Each individual, organization and department will earn points as pictured above. The more points you earn by riding and by encouraging others to ride too, the higher up the leaderboard your organization and department team will go.
This is both a national and global competition - your colleagues around the world can take part in this as well.
There will be great prizes that you and your colleagues can win!
There is a small entry fee for each workplace team to cover the cost of administering the Challenge and the prizes. Either the company can pay this directly online via credit card or by check on invoice, or a city/TMA or another organization can pay to cover the entry fees of the organizations in their area.
The Challenge will run the whole month of September.
We'll provide a promotion pack to make it easy to promote internally to your co-workers.

Apps

You can use one of the following apps:

Ride Report
Strava
Map My Ride
The Love to Ride app

How to Take Part

Register on the website (or log in if you've registered on Love to Ride before)
Create a team or join an existing team
Ride a bike anywhere, anytime, during the month-long Challenge.  
Record your rides on the website (or via an app) to earn points  
Recruit your colleagues and friends to ride and join in too.  
Go into the prize drawing!

Win Prizes!

Free prizes, just for riding your bike? Yes please!

Prizes announced in April.

Local Sites

Interested in getting a local site for the National Bike Challenge with local leaderboards for your area/city/region?

Request a local site here.

We ran 5 webinars about the National Bike Challenge and local sites. You can hear a recording of the webinar here including the Q and A at the end to learn more (it’s only 28 minutes long).

Business Profiles

Interested in getting a page for your organization?

This will be the online bicycling community for you and your colleagues. This can be a global page so that staff from across the country and around the world can also be involved.

Set-up your business profile page here.

Tried and Tested

The above team challenge format and the website technology built to run it has already been tried and tested in a National and local campaign called ‘Biketober’ which ran last October with much success. We are repeating this same format (with some improvements based on feedback) for the National Bike Challenge in May 2018 because it worked so well.

Who’s running the Challenge

Love to Ride and the League of American Bicyclists are joining forces to bring you an exciting National Bike Challenge format in 2018.

About Love to Ride

Love to Ride is the online platform that gets more people riding, more often. Through our website and programs we have engaged more than 310,000 people and have encouraged more than 77,000 ‘non-riders’ to try riding a bike.

We work with cities, businesses, advocacy groups and riders around the world to provide best practice bicycle encouragement programs and make it easy and fun to encourage our friends, family, colleagues and community to rediscover the joys of riding.

More about Love to Ride for Cities

More about Love to Ride for Business

About the League of American Bicyclists

For generations past and to come, The League represents bicyclists in the movement to create safer roads, stronger communities, and a bicycle-friendly America. Through information, advocacy and promotion, we work to celebrate and preserve the freedom cycling brings to our members everywhere.

We Believe

Bicycling brings people together.

When more people ride bikes:

Life is better for everyone;
Communities are safer, stronger and better connected;
Our nation is healthier, economically stronger, environmentally cleaner and more energy independent.

Learn more about The League

A Tool for Encouraging Riding

We know that riding a bike has tremendous benefits and that the best way to realize those benefits is to get on a bike. So we provide the incentives, tools and support to help you and your friends, colleagues, and family to start riding and experience the joys and benefits of bicycling firsthand.

Love to Ride offers a single platform where you can keep track of your riding, find answers and resources to help you ride more confidently, get access to discounts at local bike shops, win prizes for riding, and to encourage your friends and colleagues to ride (and win prizes for that too!).

We like to think of people who take part in Love to Ride programs and Challenges as partners who help us to spread the love of bicycling by combining our tools with your enthusiasm!

Got More Questions?

FAQs - National Bike Challenge

Registered on Love to Ride in the past? Log in here! (welcome back!)