Not Fit to Challenge
My new employer bought into the recent “fitness benefit” trend by contracting with a plan administrator to offer a bounty of 25¢ per mile biked or walked, to a maximum of $60 per month, which I’ve been easily maxing out this spring.
But their system also allows employers to create “fitness challenges”, where teams of employees pool their efforts, and the team with the highest point total gets “bragging rights and a special prize”.
Buildium just completed a seven-week fitness challenge that ran through most of April and May. In a hundred-person company, forty employees signed up, forming eight teams of five.
It was my first corporate fitness challenge, and since you know me, I’m sure you can predict how it went. So now I’m now going to exercise those bragging rights I just earned…
Despite being one of the oldest participants; despite runners earning twice as many points per mile as bikers; and despite taking an entire week off while I was visiting Pittsburgh, I finished with more points than anyone else in the company… way more.
My only competition was provided by the other serious cyclist in the group. But other than my honored rival, no one else accumulated more than two-thirds of my points. Only five people could earn half my total, and I more than tripled the activity level of 25 participants.
Between walking to work during the week and long weekend rides, my final average was just shy of 20 miles per day. Since I almost never rode during the week, the two centuries I did on weekends definitely helped.
Unfortunately though, the fitness challenge is a team competition, and two of us were outliers on a team of underachievers. Despite my team having the first and third highest point-getters, our remaining three members were all in the bottom ten, including one guy who was absolute dead last, taking seven weeks to accumulate as many points as I get from one normal Saturday ride. Why would you sign up for a fitness challenge if you’re gonna come in 40th out of 40? So despite taking both gold and bronze individual medals, my team still came runners up to a more balanced group who had five steady, consistent performers.
But that isn’t about to stop me from righteously bragging that I am the single fittest, most active person in the company.
I suspect that’ll be particularly irritating to my coworkers a month from now, when another forty of them will have to pedal alongside me through the two-day Cape Cod Getaway MS Ride.
They might not be looking forward to that, but I definitely am!