So for Christmas I got a super awesome
Garmin Vivofit. My fitbit just wasn’t cutting it for what I wanted so I was
more than pleased when mama got me one for Christmas!
The first few months were
great. I was meeting and or exceeding my 10,000 step goal every day especially
on days when I ran. I was seriously Rock Star status. And then I started
exploring the different tab and I found challenges.
Curious, I clicked on it
and thus started my descent into the rabbit hole. YOU GUYS you get to compete
again total strangers to see who can win a challenge every week. So the first
week I was placed in a 60k step challenge. I was like NO PROBLEMO! I ended up
in like 7th for the week. W….T….F I am not a 7th place (6th
loser but I digress).
I ramped it up the next week and I WON! And I won AGAIN!
Now
with winning comes a cool “badge” on your app.
I exceeded the
challenge steps it bumped me up, it’s usually a 5k increase so for a while I
was good and then one week I went somewhere or something and was walking a LOT,
like 40,000 steps in a day! The damn thing bumped me up to 100k steps. WHOA let’s
stop this horse right here! That’s about an average of 17k steps a day and the
people in this category do not mess around. I started to PANIC, yes I panicked
over a “virtual challenge” but I had been on a roll winning challenges. On day
1 I was in DEAD LAST with my 13k steps. DEAD FREAKING LAST!
And then I found a
loop hole, I’m not proud of this but I was in my car one day tapping my hand to
the beat of the music and noticed my steps were increasing. So to test the
theory I tried it again, by God in a short 10 minutes I had 1000 steps. But
this is cheating I can’t really count those as steps, can I?
That was the end
of honesty in the competition for me. I tried to tell myself it was okay that I
was switching arms and using a small weight when I was lifting my arms to get
step credits. I literally became obsessed with winning this challenge, I would tap my hand at work, in the car, watching tv and so on.
I can’t tell you how
many steps I even took that week because it was so skewed by the non-steps. I
won the challenge easily with my 110k steps, a bump up to 120! I won that week
too. And then it bumped me to 130k and I knew I was in trouble. 21k steps A
DAY! I literally started panicking. OVER A GLORIFIED PEDOMETER VIRTUAL
CONTEST!!! I knew right then I had to quit,
I wasn’t being honest with myself
or my Garmin, I couldn’t figure out how to leave the challenge on my phone so I
teetered between keeping the range going until I could but my brain (and my elbows)
had enough. When I got home I logged onto my account and I felt so much relief
pushing that Leave Challenge button. The pressure was gone! I couldn’t believe
I had let something like that take over my life. I was literally skipping giddy!
I thought about taking the
Garmin off for a few days just to clear my head but it was as if the cheating
side of me was gone when I deleted the challenges. I’m back to my 10-13k steps
a day and content with that. I can’t see myself every joining the challenge
groups again, maybe it was an addiction to those badges I got for winning the
challenges but I’ll take boring badges every 100k then psycho crazy eyes Erin
trying to beat the system.
I laughed at myself when I was writing this which is
good since the whole experience was highly traumatizing for me. On a side note
I didn’t get hurt at all during this time period. Small victories people! That's it for now. Go outside and play, it's SUMMAH!
