2012-366 Day 129 – Suspicious

Jess’ office recruited me into a program sponsored through the school promoting physical fitness (I was the “ringer” since I already do running, soccer, karate, ultimate frisbee, etc). Over the course of approximately two months, we were supposed to track our activities, with 30 minutes earning you a star for the day and a 60 minute cap. The number of stars and minutes were then averaged over your team members and added together to come up with a team score. The team leader board was open to all and you can check out who is on each team, but only your team can see your individual numbers.

Now, there are no checks and balances on this system, the website will gleefully accept any input and post it to your total. I took this as a personal challenge and have made sure to do at least 60 minutes of activity everyday over the last 57 days, earning a perfect 57 stars and 60 minute average. The rest of my team has been doing quite well, and we spent the majority of the time period dueling for first place with another team, constantly leapfrogging each other.

That was until last Friday, when Jess was on the phone with her office while we were at the Psychology softball game and was informed that we had been jumped and were in second place by nearly 10 points. Keep in mind how the scoring works, an average in two categories (stars and minutes) over all the people. Now also take into account that when I checked online it wasn’t the team we were dueling with who overtook us, but the third place team, which had been over 10 points behind us in the first place. They achieved a 20 point swing in one day, so either one or two of their team members had not entered anything and did it all at once, or something very suspicious was going on.

Since we can’t see their individual totals, we have no way of knowing what actually occurred. A request to check it out was filed with the people running the program (especially since they made another substantial jump today, the last day of the program), though I don’t expect anything to come of it. I will content myself that our team did very well and did so fair and square, and I will always come down on the side of honor and integrity over winning.

Weight: 229 Loss: 11 lbs – Running Yearly Mileage: 142 miles
Fitocracy Level: 20 (46946 points, 4404 to next level) – ID: disciplev1