In the community
Our biggest year yet for sponsoring events to promote fitness
On April 30, we sponsored our city’s first National Walk@Lunch DaySM to encourage Philadelphians to use their lunch break for walking and to demonstrate how easy it is to fit regular exercise into a busy schedule. About 5,000 local employees, predominantly our members and many of our associates, walked 1.5 miles around City Hall or on routes near their suburban offices, burning an average of 122 calories each and joining tens of thousands walking for National Walk@Lunch Day in all 50 states.
The 29th annual Blue Cross Broad Street Run, which we sponsored on May 4, broke participation records with 19,111 runners crossing the finish line — the race’s largest number ever and a 23 percent increase in participation over 2007. The pack included 6,700 of our members. Since it began in 1979 with about 1,600 runners, organized by the Philadelphia Department of Recreation, has become the largest 10-miler in the nation.
On October 4, more than 2,200 Philadelphia-area residents took part in the first American Diabetes Association Step Out: Walk to Fight Diabetes, which we sponsored to fight the rising incidence of diabetes in our area. More than 800,000 Pennsylvanians have the disease. Step Out’s walkers helped the association raise $400,000 for research and programs to prevent and cure diabetes and to improve the lives of the one in nine Americans with diabetes.