Saturday, May 07, 2011

Adrian's Summer Running 2011: Juniper Systems Challenge


Before the month of May, my company's fitness guy (Steve Suhaka) decided to announce another fitness challenge to Juniper Systems employees and their families. The previous 4 months, Steve made a fitness challenge for Juniper employees that looked at how many pushups and situps you could do, as well as VO2 max and body mass index. This current fitness challenge is a cardio challenge where each person participating will track how many miles they cover in 5 different categories:

  • Walking
  • Hiking
  • Running
  • Cycling
  • Swimming


Because Cycling miles aren't the same as running/walking miles, each mile cycling will count as 1/3 of a mile.  And because of the strenuousness of swimming, each mile of swimming will count as 3. Running, Hiking, and Walking will all count normally; 1:1.

The overall goal of this cardio fitness challenge was to have the participants cover 20,000 miles over the course of 16 weeks. With some rough calculations, that means the 80+ people signed up would need to cover about 15 or so miles per week; which is doable. At the end of the fitness challenge, Juniper Systems will have a 5k fun run to cap it off. A mileage sheet was emailed to the participants to record each person's miles for each of the 16 weeks (in each category of cardo).

I was pretty excited about this because I had already signed up for a half marathon and this would help motivate me to run.  And I had a feeling that they would reward people who ran the furthest, etc and I am hoping to be one of those people.  I was a little sad that Lisa couldn't do this because, at the start of this, she was about 6 months pregnant.

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