Corporate Challenge Kickoff

The Kansas City Corporate Challenge kicked off Friday afternoon at the Truman Sports Complex with the kickoff walk.

The whole event is a family fun walk and celebration. The participating companies sponsor tents for their employees, many with live music, food, etc., in the middle of the annex parking lot. The competition portion of the event is a mile-long walk around the parking lot, where company employees earn points by walking, and many bring spouses and children to participate in the walk.

It is a fun, festive way to encourage exercise and participation by people of all ages and activity levels.

The walkers pick up a card at the start of the walk, where they write their name and their company name and then deposit their name in a barrel at the end to be counted for the walk to earn their points.

This year there were a couple of new things. At least while I and my family walked by on the first portion of the walk, there were people from one company in red shirts passing out bags of cheez its to the walkers.

On the far side from there, about three-quarters of the way around, there was Bobber, the water safety dog, encouraging us to always wear our life jackets around water. My son started joking after that about seeing a puddle and needing a life jacket. We did get a nice picture taken with Bobber. They were also giving out flying discs made to look like a life-preserver with water safety information on them.

After completing the walk, we went to the company tent for food — hot dogs and hamburgers for us, and no music (there was plenty of that from neighboring company tents). Got to meet a lot of people from work that we don’t normally have time to mingle with.

A few companies were also passing out various freebies advertising themselves. If you roamed around you could find various things. We didn’t check that out this year, and I got the feeling there was less than previous, though we did get a couple of nice things.

The competition walk is about a miles, but you put in at least twice that amount of actual walking by the time you also walk to and from the parking lot, and around the tents to and from the company tents. So it does give a lot of encouragement to having a “good stretch of the legs” as well as a fun celebration kicking off the challenge competition.