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.

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!

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!

This year’s 2 Mile Challenge welcomed thousands of registrants who helped avoid more than 65,000 car trips totaling upwards of 470,000 miles! My favorite part of that fact is that you all did that manually. I hear from people all the time about how they forgot to log their trips or mis-counted … we know it’s a trying process, and we hear your suggestions to make it better. Plans are in the works to make logging your trips easier. But despite all that, stats and counting miles aren’t why we’re here.

Since our company’s humble beginning on Gary’s bike ride, the bicycle is literally in the CLIF Bar DNA. We love the bike for everything that it is: the fun, the freedom and even in hopes that its use can help fight climate change. We’re just tickled pink that you came to play with us this year in efforts of motivating our collective selves (yes, us too!) to find more excuse to ride our bikes more often. It’s as simple as that.

While the team competition for this year is now concluded, we are excited to announce that beginning today, November 1^st, we are carrying forward the Featured Challenges on 2 Mile Challenge into the previously-advertised “offseason.” Because really, what’s an offseason?! The site will function as it always has, but you’ll notice that we’re transitioning into a One Team approach. That means that Red, Gold and Blue Teams are merging into one super team called “Ride Your Bike Because it’s Awesome Team.” Or something like that … we’re still working on the name.

For those extra hard-core folks out there who love the challenge and want to continue to log trips with us into the new year, I can promise some brand new incentive gear to keep you moving (and lit and warm). While this happens, we’ll be spinning hard on some new updates and surprises for 2012 2 Mile Challenge, which I’m super excited about sharing with you as we get things ready to kick off in the Spring. Find the November Challenge waiting for you here.

Keep in touch with us, as always, here on the blog and on Twitter and Facebook.

Thanks for being on the ride with us; it’s been a pleasure!

Ryan

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

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!

One of the biggest ways we have been able to keep things dynamic and interesting here on 2MC is through our incredibly inspiring nonprofit partners. We chose these three organizations again this year to help round out the story of 2 Mile Challenge and, of course, infuse these groups with some funds to carry out the good fight: creative solutions for fighting climate change and bike advocacy for all ages.

As we get ready to head into the home stretch of October, I thought I’d take a quick second and give some equal time to all three of our team beneficiaries and clue you into some of the amazing work that’s going on RIGHT NOW towards these same ends, in fact. Take a peek below for further review, and where you feel compelled, we urge you to get involved!

Thanks, as always. You guys rule.

-Ryan

• BLUE TEAM: This Saturday (September 24^th) is the 350.org Worldwide “Moving Planet day of action.” From a bicycle-powered concert in Hamburg, Germany, to a massive bike rally for a sustainable transportation plan in Sao Paulo, Brazil, to an inspiring march to stop coal plant development in Andhra Pradesh, India, Moving Planet will be a powerful day to take action for a fossil fuel free future, and stand in solidarity with the climate movement around the world. Moving Planet will be a day to put our demands for climate action into motion—marching, biking, skating—calling for the world to go beyond fossil fuels.  http://www.moving-planet.org

• RED TEAM:  Thousands of schools and hundreds of thousands children and their parents will be walking and bicycling to school on Wednesday, October 5 as a part of International Walk to School Day; see who is celebrating and reducing car trips in your community.  The Safe Routes to School National Partnership applauds these festive, one-day celebrations and works year-round to advocate for safe, convenient and fun ways for kids and families to use active transportation and increase their minutes of physical activity.  Check out some of the National Partnership’s publications on enacting positive bicycling policies in your community and creating excellent Safe Routes to School programs in low income schools and communities – they rock!

• GOLD TEAM: The Alliance for Biking & Walking invites professional, amateur and advocate photographers to submit their best images of biking and walking to the 2011 Photo Contest. The contest aims to both celebrate the beauty and energy of active transportation and continue to build an online library of high-quality images that can be used by bicycle and pedestrian advocacy organizations across North America. The overall grand prize is an all-expenses-paid, 10-day bike trip to Tuscany, Italy. The deadline to submit your photos is October 31st.  http://www.peoplepoweredmovement.org/PhotoContest

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!

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?

With that, I bring you the neatly wrapped details on the new August/September Featured Challenge!  We’ve partnered with our, eh hem, *good* friends over at GOOD to bring you your latest installment of our version of “motivational assistance”: The BIKE FOR THE PLANET Featured Challenge.

Starting August 1st and rolling through September 25th, we’re engaging in the first ever 8 week challenge. Yep … 8 weeks, folks. It’s a CHALLENGE, remember!? The good news is that we’ll be awarding prizes every week! Prizes will include (but not limited to) lots and lots o’ CLIF Bars, GOOD magazine subscriptions, 2MC Gear and a bevy of $100 gift certificates to one of our favorite cycling apparel makers, Twin Six. Cool, right?

By the way, there’s still a ton of time and energy left to go here before we award the entirety of our $100,000 in 2MC grants. The night is still young in the Team competition – so while I hear the Gold Team’ers are doing their best not to gloat, both Red and Blue riders still have plenty of time to close the gap. Keep up the great work recruiting family, friends and … rivals? … in joining you on some challenges! Remember that avoiding even just a car trip or two here and there is an awesome feat.

To all a good bike,

Ryan

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?!

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!

Prizes* are as follows:

• Week 1 – Bike Jersey
• Week 2 – Commuter Bag
• Week 3 – Helmet
• Week 4 – Bike Rack
• Grand Prize – GIANT Escape City Commuter Bike + Year’s Supply of CLIF Bars

Thanks again for joining us on the 2 Mile Challenge!

*Prize giveaway subject to official rules.

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.

I, for one, have found it difficult to find the evidence necessary to recruit the “autolubbers” in my circle of amigos. There’s plenty of empirical evidence of the benefits of biking, but sometimes the argument gets derailed from a sheer lack of know-how and ability to provide comfort for their fears. This Guide is a great start, and we hope you enjoy!