Wheel life at Gallagher

Every year Gallagher in New Zealand get behind the BNZ Corporate Challenge which sees corporate teams from across the Waikato cycle around Cambridge’s Grassroots Trust Velodrome.

With the venue only 20 minutes from our Hamilton office, and our focus of coming together as #TeamGallagher to solve every challenge, it’s an opportunity that’s hard to pass up. This year, we had three teams compete, and it sounds like they had a wheelie good time!

Each team of five people had seven weeks to train before race night, and as Mike Randle, Security Solutions Engineer and a key player in making it all happen, explains, it was awesome to see such a variety of participants.

“The BNZ Corporate Challenge is an opportunity to face your fears, build confidence doing something you never thought you could achieve, and create awesome friendships across different departments. For us to have enough interest to send three teams along was really special.”

And it really was a mix of departments. From Hardware, Logistics, and Electronics, to R&D, Risk & Responsibility, and Marketing, and everything in between, riders came together to race it out.

Production Team Member Efren Rivera, said he had no idea about what the competition was, but that didn’t stop him from signing up.

“I was puzzled and went to sign up not knowing what to do. I was told all we needed was basic biking skills to enter.

“I was met with a very supportive team and good trainers. In our first training session I had difficulty finding my balance in the track – it wasn’t until the last 10 minutes until I was finally able to ride in a straight line!”

It wasn’t all smooth sailing for Ren unfortunately, and as he found out, resilience was one of the most important skills.

“In our second week I started really confident, but on the track my bike slipped on the curve and sent me sliding down the track. I was a bit hurt and thinking of quitting, but decided to carry on. I still managed to finish the course after that fall, but I couldn't work for couple of days afterwards.

“Throughout our training I needed to muster and apply all the things I learned. Even though the mind says ‘I can do it!’, the body says otherwise. This is where the challenges are persevered - despite the falls and despite the difficulty, we need to strive better to overcome our fears. It doesn't matter how many times we fail. We just need to push harder and train better.”

Although the teams just came short of a placing on race night, they left with a new experience, new friendships, and perhaps a new passion - albeit a bit tyre-d!