This holiday season the Singletracks community has the opportunity to give the gift of biking to 10 underprivileged kids through two different groups. Our goal: raise $100 to purchase a bike and helmet for each child by November, 30, 2011.

Belmont Hills Elementary School 3rd Grade Class

A friend of ours teaches 3rd grade at Belmont Hills Elementary school just outside Atlanta and organizes a project each year to bring Christmas to her students and their families. Here’s how she describes the project:

This project began 5 years ago when I had my students make a Christmas List for Santa.  Many of my students just sat doing nothing.  When I began talking with them, I realized why they were just sitting.  As 2nd graders, they looked me in the eyes and said “We know Santa isn’t real. He never brings us anything. Why should we make a list of things we will never get?”

Many of the students wear the same outfit to school every day and take home parts of their school lunch to younger siblings that do not get provided (free meals) by the school.

This year’s Christmas project will touch 19 families with a total of 67 kids. Of those kids, 8 have asked for bikes.

Ryder Transportation / Salvation Army

Ryder Transportation is sponsoring 75 children this holiday season and they reached out to us asking if we could provide 2 new or used bikes for a 10-year-old boy and girl. Ryder can use more bikes if we can raise them but have only asked us to commit to two.

It’s easy for many of us to drop $100 on a single bike upgrade – just imagine how much a $100 bike would mean to a child and a family who has so little!

How to Give

We’ve set up a donation page on Fundly.com where anyone can contribute funds. Our goal is to raise $1,000 to purchase bikes and helmets for the kids, boys and girls, ranging in age from 3 to 14 (though most are 8-10 years old). Donate as much or as little as you can – every bit counts!

If anyone is able to provide kids’ bike and helmets to us at a discount for this project, please email us directly (info@singletracks.com). Or, if you have a new/used kids’ bike that’s in great shape and ready to ride, let us know about that as well! (Just remember we’re located in Atlanta so you’ll need to ship the items to us.)

This post is a bit of a holiday mountain bike potpourri – enjoy!

Egg Nog Recovery Drink

Just in time for the holidays, INFINIT Nutrition has released an Egg Nog flavored sports recovery drink (seriously). From the press release, “because you’re recovering from a triathlon or 24 hours of non-stop mountain biking doesn’t mean you can’t celebrate with a little holiday cheer.” When I first read the headline I honestly threw up in my mouth a little bit but the company says they were “astounded” by the number of orders they received. I’d be astounded if they got a single order so maybe that’s not too far off.

I hadn’t heard of INFINIT before but apparently they offer customizable sports drinks you can order online and the concept is similar to the cereal company, Me & Goji, we wrote about this summer. If anything, the Egg Nog idea got us talking about INFINIT so I guess it wasn’t a completely dumb idea.

MTB Magazine Back Issues Online

If you were thinking about getting a subscription to Mountain Bike magazine this year, check this out: Google Books now has 17 complete past issues online for free. The issues are from April 2006 to November 2008 so some of the stuff may be out of date but it’s still a good way to kill some time at work. As a bonus, since it’s hosted by Google you can do a text search on the magazine – no more flipping pages to find what you want. Sweet.

UPS Using Bikes for Holiday Deliveries

Singletracks member fleetwood posted this one in the forums but if you missed it, UPS is using bike-based delivery vehicles in some California neighborhoods this holiday season. The San Jose Mercury News did a pretty lengthy write-up on the concept with pics and even a video (embedded below). It’s hard to tell from the photos but it looks like the bike even has a UPS brown paint job. Cool idea, though I doubt we’ll see this anywhere but Cali anytime soon.