How we became athletes in 3 weeks

From late May to early June, over 30 Sudolabs developers, product managers, designers, marketers, and recruiters competed against one another for three weeks. It was challenging, and fun but most of all exciting. Our team members had a variety of weekly challenges to overcome, such as triathlon or early morning activities.

The rules were quite straightforward. Diverse activities were assigned coefficients, which were multiplied by the number of km in that particular activity. These included biking (road & mountain), walking, running, hiking, swimming, or inline skating.

Example: You ran 5 kilometers, so your total is 15 kilometers. (5km x 3 coefficient = 15km)

How about other activities that do not allow you to count kilometers? Such as workout or yoga? As a solution, we proposed getting 1km from every 15 minutes of activity and multiplying it by coefficient four.

The activities were recorded on Strava and then exported to an Excel sheet with the following coefficients. The minimum requirement to have your activity recorded was also present. See the visual below 👇🏻

To acclimatize our athletes to the spirit of the challenge, we launched a tough weekly challenge from day one: a triathlon. During the triathlon, one had to run 3km, bike 10km or mountain bike 5km, and swim 500m - all in one day. To our surprise, many people succeeded!

Early risers enjoyed the second week's challenge, which was to record any sport activity that happened before 7 in the morning. The number of extra kilometers earned for these activities indeed increased compared to the first week.

The last week was the most demanding challenge, as well as the most thrilling. To get the 40km bonus, one had to do sports every single day for a week, while the minimum was 15km per day after coefficients. While many of us pushed ourselves to our limits and completed the last weekly challenge, our superstar from the HR department Majka Knisova won the challenge with a significant lead!

As a team, we like to be called Sport 5000. It was back in autumn when we committed to this name and we use it until this day. In fact, we made cool functional t-shirts for the participants of our internal challenge!

This was our first internal sports challenge and there is still a lot of room for improvement in terms of adjusting coefficients, recognizing different types of workouts, or announcing the current leaderboard more frequently. However, we had a great time and celebrated accordingly with pizza and beer!

A huge congratulation goes out to everyone who participated 🙌🏻