Blog contribution by Henry Heisler, Director, Perficient’s Microsoft Practice
About three years ago, I moved from Perficient’s Chicago office to the Southern California location. I’m a cyclist and triathlete and wanted the opportunity to be active and outdoors year-round.
I live about 8 miles from the office and try to ride to and from work about once a week, and whenever the topic arises, I’ve encouraged others to do the same. Although I had met up with a couple of colleagues for bike rides outside of work, we hadn’t yet had a larger post-work ride.
That recently changed thanks to the planning efforts of my Southern California colleagues Stan Tarnovskiy, Michael Toole, Tatjana Starovoitova, and Jerry Fetzer. We had our first ride together two weeks ago and then met up again last Thursday for a slightly longer version of the same route.
These two rides were both mountain bike rides on local Irvine and Laguna Beach trails, and the route crosses several small wooden bridges. They became the inspiration behind the name of our new outings: Two Bridge Thursdays.
The feedback from colleagues both locally and company-wide has been extremely positive, and many more people are now planning to join us. To help make the ride more accessible to everyone, we’re planning to mix in road-cycling routes. Irvine and Southern California have hundreds of miles of bike trails open only to pedestrians and bicycles, so nobody will have to worry about automobile traffic. Our ride this week may be on the road, and we’re looking at more like 10 people who may participate, with hopefully more than that in the future.
Just like me, many people here in Southern California enjoy outdoor activities and athletic pursuits outside of work. In addition to more traditional social events like happy hour and outings such as our annual picnic, bowling and game day, we wanted a more active way to engage with colleagues.
During our rides we’ve had time to laugh, joke, and catch up a bit on work, but also to learn more about our lives outside work and continue building relationships that will help us continue building a more tightly-knit Perficient community within the California geography. Although we all come to Perficient from different backgrounds and walks of life, we share more in common than we all previously thought, and what better way to discover that than while out riding bikes?
View more photos from Two Bridge Thursdays in our Facebook album.
Follow our Life at Perficient blog on Twitter via @PerficientLife.
Connect with Perficient on LinkedIn.
