Tour de France - inclusive and engaging mywellness challenge

Here’s one of the challenges we’re running in the mywellness challenge club this July. At first, it seems like a challenge for keen cyclists. But with a couple of simple twists, you can make it appealing to all members who visit your club. 

Le Tour is the biggest bike race in the world, and unless you have no bikes in your facility, you’d be missing a trick not to run a cycling challenge in July. It needs a little extra explanation if you include both twists, but it’s worth the extra interaction with members for the fun factor and social media exposure that you’ll get.

Tour de France (6th - 28th July)

So, the classic Tour de France challenge is based on who can cycle the furthest.

IF you want to reward your keen cyclists, then you can include activities outside the club, but you’ll likely have some members churning out hundreds of km on STRAVA every week, who will run away with it (we suggest you create a separate TdF outdoor challenge to keep them happy).

For the regular [indoor] TdF challenge, it is simplest to only include activities inside the club, and to limit the equipment to regular and incline bikes.

• Name: Tour de France 2019
• Challenge Type: Distance Cycled
• Won by: Who cycles the most
• Commences: 6 Jul for 23 days
• Prize: voucher/prize from local business for first, 50th and 100th position
• Individual
• Exercises: Only cycling in the club 

Now here are the twists;

Lantern Rouge

In Le Tour, you need to come within a certain time behind the leader to avoid disqualification each day. This is impractical and complicated to run in club, so we suggest using a ‘turkey’ [as in the Chase the Turkey challenge].

Rename one of your instructors as ‘The Lantern Rouge’ [you might change their photo too, see right] and have them cycle a few km each day.

Everyone who falls behind the Lantern Rouge is disqualified from the challenge each day.
The Lantern should not cycle too far or fast, but far enough to keep participants on their toes! In reality, you can’t disqualify participants from a mywellness challenge, so people who’ve dropped behind could put in extra effort and get back past the Lantern, which is fine, from a participant motivation perspective.

If you want to be very strict, you could keep a spreadsheet of disqualifications (useful to ensure you don’t repeat social announcements).
This twist is great for social media content – you can name members who are close to the cut-off to add a little extra motivation, and tell them that the Lantern will be putting in a 5k ride today…

Multiple random winners

As well as congratulating the member who cycles furthest (typically a very keen member who’s in the club everyday), it’s good to celebrate other participants too. There are lots of different ways of doing this, some reward the keen members, other reward more, or random members:

• Prize for the 50th,100th, etc place members
• Prizes for every member who does better than average (total all km cycled, and divide by participants to get average)
• Prizes for the top 10
• Prizes for everyone who does double the Lantern Rouge distance

You can apply similar prize categories (and a Lantern Rouge) to the outdoor TdF challenge, it is just likely to be harder to monitor.

Let us know how you get on with this Tour de France challenge, or if you have other ideas of innovative or event-based challenges?

Would you like a 12-month challenge calendar, monthly challenge ideas, a copy of our challenge e-book,  and free webinars and tips on running engaging mywellness challenges? Then click here to join the mywellness challenge club today.