7.18.2011

RAGBRAI and the Global Corporate Challenge

My employer is one of many around the world participating in the Global Corporate Challenge (GCC), a 16-week-long walking challenge in which employees walk around the world virtually. This challenge began on Thursday, May 19, and ends on Tuesday, September 6.

While this event focuses on walking as exercise, having participants tracking their daily steps recorded by their pedometers, it also makes allowances for people who cycle or swim. This is going to help me and my team out when I am cycling across Iowa on RAGBRAI next week. According to GCC's website, 2.5 miles of cycling is the equivalent to 0.6 mile of walking, or 1,563 steps. So if I ride all 454 miles of RAGBRAI, excluding the optional loop on Tuesday, I will earn 283,841 steps for me and my team for the week. Of course, this is just the steps I will earn from cycling. I will be walking quite a bit once I reach my destination each night. I will of course be counting these steps as well.

Now I am concerned that the average of 40,549 steps from cycling each day will earn me a GCC "speeding ticket." Such tickets are issued whenever someone records an abnormally large number of steps for a day. If this happens, I will just have to explain to GCC why my step count is so high. This should not be too much of a problem, but it could delay my entry of some of my steps. As I have been averaging around 10,000 steps a day so far, this would be a significant increase.

I will be blogging about my progress on RAGBRAI, so be sure to check back next week to see how the ride is going.

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