2007 Parker Flight to Fitness Challenge

Even though I was still sick, I was smiling for a while on 4/3/07 when preliminary results of our company sponsored 10-week Flight to Fitness (FTF) challenge showed that the 10-person team I've captained (Parker People Patiently Practicing Pulmonary Performance to Procure Proper Physical Proportions- "P^10...or P to the Power of Ten" for short) finished in 1st place out of 26 teams in the all important "Percent of Campaign Goal Achieved" with a final score of about 158% of goal, 53,000+ team points, and more than 11,000 personal points.



"P to the Power of Ten" team photo (click on photo to view enlarged version)

They tried to equalize teams with high performers by judging on % of goal achieved rather than raw minutes. This meant that most members of competitive teams had to increase their goal minutes at least once, and sometimes several times, to keep their results within guidelines...at least for the first 8 weeks, after which they turned us loose to earn as many Life Points as we could without being artificially tethered to goals that were lower than what we were then willing to do in order to WIN! The bottom line goal was to encourage employees to be more active and develop habits that would help ensure a healthier workforce, and thus help Parker's self-insured health costs to rise less quickly. This FTF "challenge" was more successful than they intended, I believe, as it was very competitive, with the top teams leap frogging each other several times in the last few weeks. One"Life Point" was earned for each minute of qualifying physical activity (ie,vigorous house or yardwork, exercise, walking, running, cycling, hiking,etc). The FTF program also awarded "bonus" points for eating specified portions of fruits and vegetables and water, or attending company sponsored lunchtime classes like yoga, line dancing, Latin dancing, etc. We finished in 4th place for team bonus points. Combining both Life and Bonus points,our team had the leading combined score of more then 60K. I'm glad its over because the 4-5 hours/weekday of exercise was exhausting me and monopolizing my life.

The official team results will be announced at a Captains Luncheon on the 19th. Last year members of the winning team were awarded 1/2 day paid vacation, a pass to Disney California Adventure (I have not been to Disneyland since this was added), and a $20 Disney certificate. P^10 team members are anxious to see what the prize for 1st place will be this year!