I can't believe this time last year I began my recruiting for Team Leapfrog. I had some pretty high expectations. I decided I would shoot for 25 team members because it was the 25th anniversary of the Bike To The Bay.
Twenty five riders seemed like a huge number for a first year team, but I didn't want an easy goal; I wanted one to work hard at.
Then, when we flew past that goal with plenty of time until the ride I knew it was too small, so I changed it to 50. As far as the fundraising goal, I figured why not shoot for the moon and make it 25,000 for the 25th Anniversary as well.
I heard a lot of comments like "Hmm... good luck with that, or well okay then..." but I had some awesome friends that were as determined as I, so I wasn't backing down.
When I was on Fred Lefevbre's radio talk show and mentioned my goal he laughed as though I was totally crazy. I am, but that's beside the point, so now I had some proving to do. We ended up with 44 team members and I was thrilled by that number for the first year.
Our fundraising number by the day of the ride was higher than most people expected, but nowhere near the 25,000 goal I was shooting for. We had the whole summer following the ride to continue to raise money, so I continued to hold out hope.
Before I knew it, there were only two weeks left until all of the fundraising money had to be in, and I went to the Bike MS website to see how close we came.
I bet this is where people would expect me to say miraculously we hit that 25 K... nope, no miracles here, just a lot of dedicated people ( that would have been a cool story though, huh?!). We did however, raise 21,989.00 with every penny counted, and that number felt like a million.
But the thing that was super cool was when Team Sitting Bull donated eleven bucks (actually 12...) to Team Leapfrog to round us up to that even more impressive goal of 22,000. It's not 25 thousand, but for our first year I'd say we did all right:)
How'd team sitting bull get everyone together for that photo??
I've already started recruiting more riders for next year and my new goal will be 30,000 to represent my 30 years of living with MS. And maybe next year we can figure out how to get our whole team in one picture too!!
Have a great weekend!!
Christine:)
The thing about goals is you meet them and raise them to continue to challenge yourself. Since you set it up to never really meet them that way, you always succeed! You did awesome this year and you glow when you talk about next year! You'll succeed again, no doubt about it.
ReplyDelete