Army of One

I decided to enter a walking challenge at work. Essentially, people team up and compete against each other to accumulate the greatest number of steps throughout the month. I had participated in a similar event back in September with members of my integration team. We won the event by a comfortable margin, but the experience irritated me. Partly because half our team barely contributed to the total. And partly because I realized that the tracking program doesn’t just add up the total steps for the team. It takes the total and divides it by the total number of people on the team. In this way, each team gets a daily average. I get that this is supposed to level-set teams so that teams with fewer members can still be competitive. But the downside is that the more “dead weight” you have on the team, the more watered down the steps of a single motivated person will be. This is what happened to the few people on our team that took the challenge seriously.

So, this time around, I decided to branch out on my own and do the challenge solo. Now, I get credit for every step I do, instead of having to divide it across other people. After just three days in, I was dominating the challenge. I was already 65,000 steps ahead of second place. After one week, I had already surpassed the total challenge goal steps of 154,000 steps.

It’s gotten so bad that one of the guys on my team told me that his wife was mad at me because I was so far ahead. She’s determined to catch and pass me. Unfortunately, she made the classic mistake of believing that more people on her team would give her an advantage. So, she recruited her husband to walk too. Now, he’s also mad at me because she’s making him exercise. If you think about it, I’m actually increasing the activity level of the entire organization. Everyone is walking more and trying harder to catch me. I may be the villain, but people should be thanking me for exploiting the loopholes and taking a very calculated approach to this challenge. So, you’re all welcome in advance.

UPDATE: Apparently, my legendary status as the villain has gained wider appeal. Several of the teams that were desperately trying to catch me have added additional people to their ranks in an attempt to increase their step count. I couldn’t help but laugh. While this logically makes sense, the formula the program uses to average steps across the team actually means that these teams are hurting themselves and will ultimately only fall further behind. But on the flip side, even more people are now getting exercise in an attempt to dethrone me!