Out of nine San Francisco Bay Area counties and 521 teams that participated in this year’s 2009 Team Bike Challenge, the winning team for Sonoma County and overall winner for all counties was Tour de Turtle from Marmot. The five-person employee team rode a total of 982 miles in the month of May and scored a grand total of 594 points -- more than any other team. Team Outspoken (also from Marmot) placed second in Sonoma country and third place overall in the same month (586 points).
The 2009 Team Bike Challenge, which was born out of the Northern California’s Bike to Work Day event, is made up of groups of five people who competed to ride their bikes for transportation as many days as possible in the month of May. There were a remarkable 521 teams in this year’s competition, cycling a total of 275,273 miles; offsetting 267,015 pounds of pollution from the air; burning 11,836,739 calories and saving $144,518 in gas money. Altogether 121 companies participated in the competition this year, including employees from Apple Inc., Safeway, Yahoo, Cisco, Caltrans and of course -- Marmot Mountain, LLC.
The winning Tour de Turtle team included Marmot employees Lupe Garcia, Scott Zeliff, Daniel Mora, Natalie Baldy and Andy Tommila. In addition, five other teams from Marmot participated, representing 30% of the company’s Santa Rosa office employees. They were also among the top 11 teams that rode the most for the month of May.
“We are incredibly proud of all the employees that took on this challenge,” explains Mark Martin, President of Jarden Technical Apparel / Marmot Mountain, LLC. “Reducing our environmental impact is a core value for Marmot at the company level and it is represented here through teamwork and personal initiative” Martin adds.
On May 14, 2009 on Bike to Work Day, there were an estimated 150,000 (+) participants who individually pledged to ride their bikes at least once in May to either work, school or to recreate. For more information about the annual event, please visit: http://btwd.bayareabikes.org.
Photo: Marmot employees who took part in Team Bike Challenge in front of Marmot Mountain, LLC, Santa Rosa (CA) / Courtesy: Ben Lucero
Those are some pretty impressive numbers in every single category, especially the pounds of air pollution that are saved by doing this. I once visited China and it seemed like there were more people riding bicycles than there were driving cars - if more companies in different states would put together more bike to work days that would help out our environment greatly. Bravo to all of the 150,000 + participants that stay motivated on the Bike to Work Day God Bless you all.
Submitted by Eddie (not verified) on Thu, 2009-10-01 23:20.» reply