Moon Walk Disgrace

The Moon Walk competition ended and they finally posted the results while I was in Louisiana...

My team ("Center for Teaching Excellence") in the 2009 Moon Walk had been in 3rd place for almost the entire competition. It's been fun over the last 10 weeks to see how we, and my buffalo friends, have fared. Team Buffalo were vying for 1st place during the whole competition. I knew my team would never be able to catch the top two teams, but I was fairly confident we would hang on to 3rd place...maybe even extend our lead over the other teams. Well, I was wrong. We ended up in 4th place (almost 5th). I cannot believe the team that passed us REALLY logged those miles. How do you increase your AVERAGE miles run by 50 miles over a weekend? Especially if you have 18 members on your team! It's not possible. Maybe I should have gone back and "logged" a few walking steps to make up for not measuring my steps with a pedometer the first 3 weeks? Or changed all of my trail runs to "hikes" so they would count double? Once a week is over, it should be locked down and done. You don't go back and change the miles you logged. The competition ended on Friday (June 12) at midnight...but you could still log your miles until Monday (June 15) at midnight. That simply encourages cheating. My team was solidly in 3rd place on Sunday morning...and ended up in 4th place come Monday evening. A bit discouraging.

The idea of this whole Moon Walk was to motivate people to be active and develop a healthy lifestyle that includes regular exercise. The spirit of the competition was not to be sneaky and deceiving by not logging miles until weeks later or changing your past logged activities. The manner in which this whole event ended has left a bitter taste in my mouth. It's a disgrace.

One positive note to this whole thing...Team Buffalo did pull out an honest win! Congratulations to them for all of their hard earned miles. It's nice to see trail runners pull out a deserved victory.