Healthy challenge keeps teachers motivated

Last Spring I made an important discovery about the staff here at Colony High. We are unbelievably competitive. I knew we had school spirit, and I knew we could be zealous about projects we took seriously, but I had no idea of the level of ruthless aggression we could reach when tested. What prompted this discovery? It was a pretty straightforward health challenge.

Since the advent of fitness trackers, all kinds of people have developed goals aimed at improving their personal health, and group challenges are designed to foster friendly competition and encouragement. Many of us at CHS were thrilled when one of our health teachers got a grant from the Mat-Su Health Foundation to purchase Fitbits for staff and students who wanted to participate in a group health challenge and get walking more during the early spring. About 25 of us—a few students, but mostly staff—showed up on the first day to get our Fitbits (or sign up with ones we already owned) and choose teams. I should have foreseen what was to come from the spirited nature of the team selection process. We made sure that students were distributed evenly across teams, separated couples, and tried to ensure that known athletes were on different teams. We planned to walk the Iditarod. We started with a rough calculation: if everyone on a team walked 4 miles a day, a team would average 80 or so miles daily, and the challenge would take roughly 13 days. I was reassured. I’ve never been what one could call wildly successful at any athletic event, but I knew even I could walk 4 miles a day. We should have known better.

When we started the challenge, I had already had my Fitbit for several months, and I was pretty regular about getting in my 10,000 steps a day. I thought I was already doing pretty well in that regard, and if you had asked me then, I would have said I could up my daily activity to some extent, but I was already using my elliptical most days and walking outside after school, so I felt pretty good. The challenge started out innocently enough. The first few days, I talked with a couple of friends on both teams, and we were getting in our basic mileage, juggling activity in with our already busy home and work lives, and feeling like this challenge was a great idea in that we could encourage and nurture each other. Then, somehow, things took a nasty turn.

Deep in my heart of hearts, I suspect that I am inadvertently responsible for what happened next. Somehow, one day, for about a minute, I popped up at the top of the leaderboard. I have no idea how it happened, but there I was. I was excited—as I said, I’ve never been successful at anything even remotely athletic, so I lost my head, and, in my excitement, posted a note to our CHS Facebook group. I wrote, “I’m so excited! For the first time in my life, I’m at the top! I know it won’t last long!” And then the wheels came off the wagon.

The next day, I saw teachers doing laps around the hallways between classes. This activity ended up providing an unexpected benefit: teachers who walked around the building said they saw and interacted with many more of their students between classes than they normally did standing by their classroom doors. Others figured out that they could march in place while watching TV at night to increase their steps and distance. Those of us who had wristband trackers learned to swing our arms while we moved around, and those with the in-pocket trackers started to rock back and forth while standing still. I started walking 15, 20, 25,000 steps a day. I shelved library books one at a time, walking a complete circuit around the library each time. I started using the bathroom at the other end of the school and walking to the office to “check the mail” as many times a day as I thought I could get away with. A friend of mine (unfortunately on the other team), walked 20 miles in a single day. It was amazing. We obsessively checked the leaderboard throughout the day and thought about (but didn’t act on) secret ways to injure those not on our team. One couple approached divorce after an ugly incident while they were on vacation when the husband reached for his wife’s hand during a romantic beach walk and she accused him of trying to stop her tracker-arm from swinging (she was proven correct when he refused to hold her other hand instead). Students who were not involved in the challenge asked me several times “What’s up with the teachers?” We went collectively, temporarily insane (and we finished the challenge in just 9 days instead of the anticipated 13).

This episode taught me several important life lessons that have been invaluable to my work as a teacher. First, the inspirational statement that “you can do more than you think you can” is more than just a sentence to cross-stitch on a pillow. If anyone had told me that I would walk 180 miles in a month, I would have told them they were crazy. But I did it. I would never have believed I could walk 12 miles in a day, but I did. I would never have believed that on a team of 20 people engaged in an athletic event, I would be one of the top 5 contributors, but I was.

The second thing I learned is that the process of doing things that are good for you is a gift that keeps giving. While at the time I started, I looked at my 10,000 steps as a day as reasonable, now my goal is 12,000 a day, and I look at that as a minimum rather than a maximum. I haven’t walked 12 miles in a single day again, but now I know I can. I also learned to be proud of myself and my accomplishments: there were several athletes (both staff and students) in the challenge, and they logged way more miles than I did. That was OK. I surpassed my own expectations in a way that showed me I needed new expectations, and that’s the ultimate goal.

Most importantly, the Iditawalk challenge reminded me how cool it is to do fun things with people you like, even if you occasionally want to maim them. Every once in a while, when we are sitting in a staff meeting or I am having a serious conversation about education with a colleague, I get a mental flash of that person doing laps around the school between classes, or I remember how we went for long walks after school even though it was cold and windy enough to make my eyes and nose run and turn my cheeks an unhealthy shade of red. These moments remind me about the most important lesson of all: working as a team really does help all of us become better individuals, and when we work together, we accomplish our goal faster and with more style than we ever thought possible.

Prudence Plunkett is the librarian at Colony High School.