He looks at the pager-like instrument the moment he steps into his house. “16,313” he announces gleefully. It’s the number of steps he took over the day — the pedometer tells him this. Suddenly, the IT professional who spends more time on his laptop than on his feet, is counting his steps. For he’s participating in Stepathlon 2014, a 100-day event, that aims to make participants fitter by the most potent of all actions — movement.
Aimed at corporates across the world, Stepathlon, a “movement for movement”, is a race in which participants, in teams of five, compete against each other and other teams to clock in the maximum number of steps over a 100-day period, that started on September 3. It’s a technology-driven, interactive race — participants are given a pedometer they can clip on; they record the readings at stepathlon.com where steps are converted into distance. As a result, everyone is aware of where one’s fellow participant stands in the “virtual course”.
“These days, we don’t walk as much as we used to,” says Chinni Krishnan, assistant vice-president of an IT company in the city, who is heading a Stepathlon team. He feels that such an event where “movement is the key” is very important — especially in a country such as ours where a majority of the population consists of youth that has access to an abundance of technology and food.
“I now walk to places within a two or three-kilometre radius from home,” he says, adding that he is walking even as he is talking to me over phone. “I walk during phone conversations at work when I don’t need to refer to the laptop,” he explains.
His team, which consists of marathon runners, participated in last year’s Stepathlon as well. “We lost more weight during the 100 days than we did by running marathons,” he says. Chinni’s team average was 21,000 steps per day last year. “We were in the top five in our company and figured in the top 200 across the world,” he explains, adding that most teams were from India.
Ring up any Stepathlon participant and he/or she is walking as they talk to you. Sriram Gopalakrishnan and Ravichandran Raghunathan are no exceptions. Both of them participated in Stepathlon 2013. “I lost eight kg then,” says Ravi. His wife is a Stepathlon participant as well. He adds, “When someone rings the doorbell at home, we both spring up to answer it, unlike before.” Sriram has a target of 15,000 to 17,500 steps a day. To him, the best thing about the Steptathlon is that it develops the habit of walking.
The urge to clock in as many steps as possible sometimes borders on obsession; participants are known to even walk while they eat.
This year too, it’s India that has registered the maximum number of companies — of the total of 350, 225 are from India. Ravi Krishnan, the CEO and co-founder of Stepathlon Pvt. Ltd, says that Stepathlon is “promoting a culture of health and wellbeing, leading to better productivity at the workplace”. He feels that globally, organisations with effective wellness programmes “have reportedly displayed significantly lower voluntary attrition than those who do not have similar initiatives”. This impacts healthcare costs, company morale, leadership and productivity, he adds.
But Chinni feels that one should look beyond this. He says that the focus should be on “taking fitness seriously”. After all, it’s the “overall health of the country” that matters most.
