Forward into The Future

At CLIF Bar, we just really love bikes. As anyone who’s familiar with our company story knows, our existence as a company is owed in large part to the bicycle. So there’s some romance to our history with bikes – but it goes much deeper than that. We love bikes for all the reasons you can muster. It’s a complete blast to get behind the handlebars and not be encumbered by traffic or parking, enjoying the ride at a slower pace on the backroads and paths of this great country. So it’s our job as a values-driven organization to support things that matter to us so that there is a better future ahead!

Our little project in 2 Mile Challenge began to help motivate ourselves and our friends to get out of our cars more often: to do right by the environment and our health by replacing car trips with a bike. And five years later, CLIF Bar is proud to continue the “2MC lifestyle” in 2012 by renewing our commitment to the future of biking.

When it comes to the good work being done for the “bike movement,” it really comes down to the inspiring work being done at the grassroots level. The bike and pedestrian advocacy organizations are the ones that are fighting the good fight from sea-to-shining-sea. We’re frequently inspired to hear the great work that’s being done across the country, increasing the number of “bike friendly” communities along the way. Three cheers for that good work, for sure!

As it goes, there are an equal (or even more) number of American communities with a much larger climb ahead of them in the push to be truly “bike friendly.” We believe it can and will improve to that state with time (and a little help from friends!). To that end, CLIF Bar will give away $100,000 again in 2012 to invest in the future of biking. But we need your help! In efforts of getting more funds to the future best biking communities slow build; we’re here for the long-haul!) throughout the rest of the year, all your activity on 2 Mile Challenge will actively support some younger and smaller communities within nonprofit bike advocacy. CLIF Bar will be highlighting a new beneficiary group each month throughout the remaining 8 months of 2012, and beyond.

If you’ve joined us on the 2 Mile Challenge before, the way to participate will feel pretty similar (and much simpler!): register or login, ride your bike and log those bike trips, manually or from our new official iPhone App. Each bike trip you log is worth $1 (*up to a pre-determined dollar cap each month*). The nonprofit beneficiary will rotate each month with the hope of spreading the love as much as possible. Speaking of love: it floweth to you, too! As always, follow us on Facebook and Twitter to hear about our giveaways for great prizes along the way.

To kick off the May Challenge, we’re excited to welcome our first 2012 beneficiary organization, BikeWalkKC.  Learn more about them on the Challenge page.

We welcome you back to the 2 Mile Challenge. Join the Ride!

New this year for iPhone users, log your trips on the official app of the 2MC, Biologic BikeBrain.

By Ryan On In 2MC community, from the homeoffice View Comments

Bike theft is the lowest crime

A great read from Outside Magazine’s Patrick Symmes this month on bike theft.

“In America’s rough streets, there are four forms of currency—cash, sex, drugs, and bicycles.”

You can find this fascinating and incredibly frustrating story here.

How do you secure your ride in public? Join the conversation on our Facebook page!

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ALLIANCE FOR BIKING & WALKING AWARDED $20,000 BONUS GRANT

Congratulations to the Gold Team on a successful bell-to-bell run of the 2011 2 Mile Challenge! Team beneficiary, The Alliance for Biking and Walking is awarded a $20,000 bonus grant for first place, bringing the Alliance’s total 2 Mile Challenge grant winnings to $35,000.

Both of the other 2 Mile Challenge nonprofit partners, the Safe Routes to School Partnership (Red Team) and 350.org (Blue Team) also win bonus grants of $10,000 and $5,000, respectively. This rounds out the total 2 Mile Challenge grant giving from CLIF BAR aimed at supporting grassroots bike advocacy and the fight against climate change. In total this year CLIF BAR contributed $100,000 to these efforts, and brings the aggregate grant total over the past three years to over $250,000. I speak for all of us here at CLIF Bar when I say “THANK YOU” to each of you for riding with us this year. It’s been an honor to work with these fabulous groups doing the good work out there on the ground for bikes and climate change, and we’re glad to have your help to divvy out the grants!

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October and Everything After

Summer’s finally arrived here in the Bay area (she always takes her sweet time), and that means one thing: it’s October!

It’s hard to believe that Saturday marks the beginning of the final month in this years 2 Mile Challenge Team competition. Everything seems to be turning up Gold, but big, big ups to the Red and Blue Teams for keeping things interesting out there all the way to the final month … more to come on how the final results shake out in our final 31 days.

In the meantime, there’s still plenty of challengin’ to be had! As always, to keep the motivation flowing and the pedals turning, we’ve got some top notch prizes to make it fun for the month. We’re excited to announce that we’re teaming up with our good friends over at Osprey Packs for the Pack Your Passion Featured Challenge! To help spread the love around, this month we’re foregoing “place” and drawing winners randomly among the successful participants. The details:

  • Ride your bike to replace 3 car trips/week for 4 weeks
  • October 1st through 29th
  • All participants completing terms of the challenge (3 trips, 4 weeks) are eligible for one of over 50 prizes.
  • Prizes include: The RAD Osprey Raptor 10 backpack; Osprey Socks, Osprey Trucker Hats, CLIF Bars and other cool surprises!

Enjoy the ride out there, and thanks as always for being apart of the 2 Mile Challenge!

Cheers,

Ryan

 

By Ryan On In featured challenges View Comments

With a little help from our friends…

2 Mile Challenge is, and has always been, a way we help to keep ourselves honest that the car is not the tool for every transportation job. Bikes are a big part of why CLIF Bar, as a company, are here, and we really just love and believe in its power: fun, freedom and … yup, fighting climate change. We’re really just incredibly humbled that so many of you have found us and come along for the ride!

By Ryan On In 2MC community, NFP FTW!, r@nd0m View Comments

This is a call

photo credit Marco Gomes, Flickr

We’re psyched to announce that we’re upping the ante for the grassroots bike movement with GOOD. Share a photo and story about your bike and you could win up to $5,000 for a bike nonprofit of your choice!

Find out all the details here.

It’s just more of the ways we’re working to keep you motivated out there on your 2MC!

 

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Santa + the August Featured Challenge

Seasons Greetings!

Hope everyone’s been able to stay out of the sweltering July heat that’s been rampant around the country. It’s been a very busy vacation month for many of us at the 2MC World HQ: much of which has been out of the way of Interwebs and enjoying the outside (novel, right?) … so I definitely have some catching up to do here on the 2MC blog now that things are back to (some) normalcy.

So, we just ticked past the halfway point of the 2011 2MC! As of this afternoon, we’ve collectively pedaled nearly 240,000 miles and avoided over 31,000 car trips! Holy wow.

Speaking of wow – I’ve recently been given “Santa”-like vision into our database, so I can now see who amongst the 2MC’ers has been less-than-naughty, nay extra nice, to the planet by riding your bike. And we all know how Santa likes to reward good behavior, right?

By Ryan On In featured challenges View Comments

Where does MN get those wonderful toys?

Minnesota – you had me at “hello.” Once again proving why MN is leading the way in the bike movement:

Check out this rad Bike Fixation Self Service Kiosk. How awesome would that be if you suddenly ran into the need for a new tube? The big question is – can you get your Blueberry Crisp CLIF Bar fix?!

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Ride Outside in July

Welcome to July, 2 Milers!

For this month’s Featured Challenge, we’ve partnered with our friends at Outside for the RIDE OUTSIDE Challenge.

Same rules as before – from July 1 until July 29th at midnight PT, log your bike rides to earn points and be eligible to win great gear from Outside and CLIF!  Different from the June Featured Challenge, your activity will make you eligible to win gear each week during the challenge, with the chance to also win the Grand Prize!

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GOOD on the 2MC

image courtesy GOOD, Inc.

We here at Clif Bar and the 2MC are psyched to announce the continuing partnership with the fine folks at GOOD again this year. We continue to enjoy their amazing talents in infographics (remember to keep tabs on our quest for 100K trips here), but we’ve got some new things in store for the coming months.

First up: check out this great resource to everything biking: from debunking myths to getting the right gear to becoming a vocal advocate in your community: The GOOD Guide to Biking for the Planet and the 2 Mile Challenge.

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