Ottawa Bike and Trail Club 2022 Mileage Challenge

Here we are at the end of 2021!  This means it’s time to start setting your cycling goals for 2022.  Setting a goal and working towards it each day is a great way to motivate yourself to get outside and ride your bike more.  

Each year we host a mileage challenge to inspire you to set a goal.  We set this up as a group challenge so that we can encourage and support each other to meet our goals throughout the year.  In the first two years we had 70+ people participate in the challenge and we logged over 200,000 miles.

We started with the Ottawa Bike and Trail Club 2020 Milage Challenge in which we challenged riders to set a goal of riding 2,020 miles for the year.  We continued in 2021 with a 2,021 mile challenge.  This year, you guessed it, we’re challenging everyone to ride 2,022 miles.   While we set these goals as a suggested target we encourage riders to set their own goal that is realistic and attainable for them.  The point is really to set a goal and work toward that goal.  Hopefully you'll challenge yourself to ride more than you did in the previous year. 

Join the Club

The mileage challenge is really a community effort and is part of the Ottawa Bike and Trail Club.  The club is a community of cyclists committed to encouraging, motivating, and supporting each other to ride our bikes and get outside.  While the mileage challenge does have a competitive aspect to it we encourage and motivate each other to meet our individual goals.  You can learn more about the club on the club webpage here.

What’s new for 2022

This year we are very excited to be making some big improvements to the challenge.  When we started in 2020, there were not many good solutions for tracking and reporting the groups progress.  So, we built our own solution which was somewhat cumbersome and hard to manage.   Riders had to remember to log in each month and record their miles so that they could be included on the leader board.  

Ride With GPS to the rescue

In 2021 Ride with GPS launched a new challenge feature!  This feature allows us to set up mileage and elevation challenges and it will automatically track your  progress and included in on a leaderboard.  The biggest benefit is that it updates the leaderboard in real-time, as you log your rides to Ride With GPS.  This means you can see your progress and view the leaderboard in real time as opposed to having to load your milage each month.  You can also sign up for multiple challenge and it will automatically included your activity in all of the challenges you are participating in. 

We have been testing these new features for the last two  months and we’re super happy with how easy it is to use.  We also received a lot of positive feedback from everyone who participated.   

How to participate

Ride with GPS has generously set us up with a tourism account which allows us to offer these challenges for FREE!  All you have to do is register for the challenge and start tracking your activity to ride with GPS. 

Register for the Challenge

So, each time your ride your bike you’ll want to record the ride in Ride With GPS.  You can track activity using your GPS device like a Wahoo or Garmin computer.  Or, if you don’t have a computer you can use the Ride with GPS app on your phone to track your activity.  Or, if you don’t have either of these you can simply log each manually on the Ride with GPS website. 

We’ve put together a video to explain the different ways to do this.