Fell into Fitness

There are a lot of positives to working at a college, and one of the biggest is the free gym. Especially when you work at a college known for its active and athletic students. I get free access to the countless treadmills, bikes, ellipticals, free weights, strength machines, pool, indoor and outdoor tracks, and more. Plus, there is a whole department of people whose job it is to run this facility and design programs and activities for students and staff. The staff program - Employee Wellness - consists mainly of staff-only group exercises classes and a points system for motivation. (Complete with prizes! Last semester, I took home a yoga mat, stability ball and resistance band. Yessssss.)

Anyway, they also have a lot of programs and seminars. This semester, they had "Fall Into Fitness," where they assessed each participant's fitness in September and again at the end of December and awarded prizes to the most improved. Today was my final assessment.

I was kind of dreading the day. I wasn't nervous, per se; I knew they probably wouldn't fire me if I did a lot worse this time around. But I had been sick the previous week, which meant I couldn't really work out, and I've been struggling with my eating lately. I already knew walking in that my weight would go up (it did). As for the actual physical tasks, I had no idea.

I wound up doing just fine. I only improved slightly on the two bodyweight exercises - most pushups and squats you can do in a minute. I did 27 and 52 respectively, a whole one more each from September. But the real money-maker was the one-mile run. In September, I finished in 8:05, a decent clip, at least for me. My internal goal was to get under eight minutes, but knowing how little I'd been able to run in the past few weeks, I wasn't sure. Thankfully, I blew it out of the water, finishing in 7:50. I AM THE FASTEST WOMAN ALIVE. Or something.

The official results aren't in, but I'm sure I didn't win. My improvements weren't great, and I'm sure other people who didn't take most of the past few weeks off performed much better. But just because I worked as a team with a couple of other people in my department, I did get a free shirt, which means it was all worth it. Because that's the only thing about working at a college: you can never get enough free t-shirts.