In the very first year of Build-A-Bike ® activities, we promoted a high-energy conclusion to the event. We thought it would be a good idea to end the program with a relay race. I had an instructor ask me last week, “What ever happened to the relay race? Why don’t we do that anymore?” I laughed and relayed this story to him.

To Race or Not to Race

The First and Only Build-A-Bike Relay RaceWhen we first created the Build-A-Bike ® charity team building event in 2005, we had a lot of ideas on what we wanted to do. Some ideas were really good and some were really bad. One of the bad ideas was to end the event with a race. We figured that after each team built their bicycle, the teams could compete in a relay race.  We posted the relay race as a bullet point on the agenda on our website and in the brochure. As you can probably guess, this idea was about as hair brained as it gets. In the very first events that we taught, we ran out of time, so we never did the race. As a result, we kept the race in the agenda on the website.

However, in 2006, I had the pleasure of conducting a Build-A-Bike ® charity team building activity for ExxonMobil in Baton Rogue, LA. The group had a blast. When we organized the program, the client representative said, “This group is really competitive, so we want to make sure and do the race at the end”.   I got excited. We had already done a few of these programs but had never been able to do the race. After all the teams completed their bikes, we had them line up. We put a few cones down to make the race boundaries.

The First and Only Build-A-Bike ® Relay Race

I enthusiastically shouted, “On your mark… Get set… GO!” All Hell broke loose. A couple of the team members fell off the tiny bikes. Since the bikes were designed for 60 lb kids, one of the team members who was a very muscular 230 lbs bent the wheel on one of the girl bikes. There were a lot of laughs, and we were able to repair the damaged bikes. However, this was the first and only Build-A-Bike ® program relay race.

Oddly enough, we got busy and just forgot that the bullet point was on our website for over a year. What was funny was that the first few additional team building companies who started offering bike team events put that item on their sites as well. I guess they though, “If The Leader’s Institute ® is doing it, we should to.” I guess, eventually, they figured out that it was a bad idea too.

Today, even though our programs are highly interact, every event is “low impact” physically. (High impact emotionally, though.)