Participants at Estevan's Excel Fitness are row, row, rowing their rowing machine, not-so-gently into the top of the international leaderboard.
Excel Fitness manager Dawn Densley said the Concept2 Fall Team Fitness challenge was one of several that are offered through the club thoughout the year.
“This one was a team challenge that startes Sept. 15 and goes to Oct. 15, to see which team completes,” Densley said. “The challenge is to get over 1 million metres per team and 10 members who each get over 100,000 individual metres. We surpassed that within five days.”
They have 16 people on their team, not all of which had rowing experience.
“We had rowers that have been rowing for months and have been consistent with it and understand strokes and paces and then we've probably got four or five members who haven't even been on the rower until the first day of the challenge,” she said. “They're all over their 100,000 metres now.”
It takes an hour and 45 minutes to two hours on the rower to do 20,000 metres, Densley said.
The gym decided to enter the competition and join the team online. The results will be known much later after the 15th. Motivation and encourgament in the gym was all that was required.
“I didn't really do anything I'd normally do but let them know the opportunity existed,” she said. “I had two or three people that were kind of gung-ho on it for the team and kind of talked about it to other people.”
The club will have five days after the competition's end date to fill any rowing that might not have gone marked and recorded.
“Then, I think they said they'd have the results before the first of November,” she said. “Currently, if you put us in the group of health and fitness clubs with 16 to 20 members, we're leading right now.”
As of last week, they've logged over 1.9 million metres with the rowing machine.
“There's prizes for the top teams and then there's individual prizes for those that have rowed a certain amount of metres,” she said. “Here at the gym we've done challenges that will keep the members individually motivated because some hit their goal metres right off the bat in five or six days. We've done little things to keep them rowing to get our metres up.”
She set the challenge to reach 1.5 million metres by the previous Monday in last week's challenge and the team and individuals got rewarded.
