Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive!

At the beginning of 2010, my workplace initiated this wonderful idea, Fitness at Work. This initiative has several different components, like "fitness breaks" where we use our two fifteen-minute breaks each day to be active (e.g. taking a 1.5 km indoor walk, strength-training sessions, stair climbing, etc) and monthly challenges. I love taking part in the fitness breaks, they break up my day beautifully and I honestly can't imagine going to work now without taking the time each day to destress like this. I was also really enjoying February's challenge, stair climbing, until people started lying about their totals.

The way the challenge worked was this: each day you would count how many flights of stairs you climbed (twelve stairs=one flight) and at the end of the week you would send your daily totals to the person in charge, who in turn would send out an email to the floor the next day stating who had the highest total for that week. There was a 50/50 raffle held at the beginning of the month, where half the money went to the ticket holder selected and the other half would go to the person who had climbed the most flights at the end of February.

In week one I climbed 590ish flights, and the email sent out stated that the highest number of flights climbed was 630ish. I thought "Fine, that just means I have to work a little harder."

In week two I had climbed 1160ish flights, but the person in first had climbed 1300ish. And I thought "Fine, that just means I have to work a little harder."

In week three I had climbed 1900ish flights, but the person in first had climbed 2300ish. And I thought "Wow, I have no chance in winning this." and I resigned myself to losing. This in itself was fine, because in the end, even if I had won the money, I would have gained something even more important than that (not to go all campy and everything ha).

At the end of week four I had climbed 2700ish flights. Here's the part that makes me mad though: the person with the highest number of flights climbed had a total of 4200ish flights. What the, where did that come from?! As IF you doubled your stair count in the last week! Honestly, I really feel like the person who won the money was lying. If it took this person three weeks to climb 2300 flights, do you really expect me to believe that he climbed 1900+ flights in one week? Please.

Let me tell you, I averaged almost 99 flights of stairs a day (with lowest day 10, highest day 201), and that was extremely difficult to fit into my schedule. It's not like my life is super busy or particularely complicated, but I'm at work from 8:15-after 5:00 most days, and to incorporate that many stairs into my day is a real challenge. A large portion of my stair climbing total came from the fitness breaks, where the regular participants (myself included) had decided to include more stair climbing in support of the challenge. This person who won with 4200 flights has never, to this date, come on a fitness break, or come on one of the lunchtime stair-climb/walks, and I'm expected to just take it at face value that he found the time to average 150 flights per day? Not happening. Even if he went to the gym either before or after work every day I would find it a little hard to believe. Actually that's not completely true, I would have found this to be a completely believable total if not for the discrepancy between the first three weeks and the last. In the last week he would have had to have climbed 271+ flights per day, which is an absolutely amazing amount of stairs to be climbing, given a full work day.

What really gets me is that he would have won anyway without that tremendous lie.

But let's say that he isn't lying, and that he really did do just a tremendous amount of stairs in a small amount of time. I can accept that maybe I'm being a bit of a sore loser. I really do believe that his total was stretched, but I also believe that what I gained from this challenge far outways the fact that I didn't win the pot of money.
1. my calves got beefy and sexy.
2. my cardio has increased slightly.
3. it takes me longer to work up a sweat.
4. I now have the stamina to sprint up at least 12 flights of stairs without feeling completely killed, which is a farcry from the 6 flights I could manage at the beginning of the month before I would have to stop to dry-heave for 30 seconds.
5. I learned that I still have the ability to push myself for the better, which was something that, until now, I really thought I had lost.

In conclusion, yes I am still kind of mad, but I think the change in myself as a result of this challenge is stronger than that. I'm amazed that it took a silly competition for me to step up and take better control of my physical well-being, but I think that that's the case for a lot of people. That makes me feel like I'm more connected to the world around me, but at the same time it makes me want to rise above these conditions that I feel tied to. Does that make sense?