I was in a fun, new relationship after going through a rough divorce. I’d made professional strides and was on a new health kick.
My then-girlfriend had raved about the Fitbit. And so I mentioned it to my friends, and we all bought watches at the same time and began doing weekend challenges together.
They have a simple premise: Over a set period (typically 24–72 hours) whoever puts in the most steps wins. Sounds good, right? Sadly, these challenge brought hopelessly shallow behavior.
The challenges begin
Unsurprisingly, it got quite competitive. We were all dudes — who grew up doing sports. There was trash talk, and people taking their weiner dogs on six walks a day. Everyone knows that playing with your weiner adds a few steps.
I was checking my phone constantly to see the leaderboard. I distinctly remember putting in seven miles and then checking the leaderboard later that day and cursing.
“How the f### is Jon ahead of me now!?!”
I put my shoes back on. My girlfriend said, “Yeah, but you just went for a walk an hour ago?!”
Several dudes even turned their Bluetooth off to stop syncing their watch. Why? So that they could wait to sync it just before the midnight cutoff — to avoid letting anyone one-up them. They lurked and waited to create an advantage.
I voiced my displeasure in the group chat, “Folks, don’t you think that’s a little bit cheap? And not as fun?”
The reply I got was, “It’s called strategy amigo :)”
In the end, we all had fun with it and it was a healthy competition. I enjoyed the Fitbit challenges.
And then things got weird
I joined a much larger walking league.
It tracked a leaderboard of 500 people each month. It also included a Facebook group where we all interacted and helped motivate each other. I only joined because my friends got burnt out on challenges. I love food too much and want to stay skinny-ish, so I needed something to keep me motivated. I never had any intention of winning or even placing top 10.
Initially, I was ranked 80th and eventually hovered between 40th and 50th each month and was thrilled with that positioning.
After all, I had a job and other priorities. Then I noticed something funky.
On our leaderboard, the #1 and #2 users were both averaging 80–90 miles a day. It was impressive — a bit too impressive. Sensing things were fishy, I clicked on one of the guy’s profiles and cross-referenced him in the Facebook group. This guy had pictures of himself, and I’ll just put it this way, he was a bit on the thicker side, which is fine — but not what you expect in the physique of a man who walks 80 to 90 miles a day.
In fact, I suspect that if walking 80 to 90 miles a day didn’t kill you rather quickly, you would at minimum, be emaciated. Gravity would not be kind to such a lifestyle. The cheating was just too obvious. I made a softball comment in the Facebook group,
“Hey, has anyone noticed that the top two people in this competition are averaging thousands of miles each month? Doesn’t that seem a fishy?”
And then, something surprising happened: my comment got deleted. I was 90% sure of it. I played dumb and posted the comment a second time, “Hey, so I noticed my comment vanished, but I thought I’d mention…”
Then my comment got deleted again and I was booted from the league! I took it on the chin and moved on. Even still — I was curious how anyone could average 80 to 90 miles a day in a Fitbit challenge. Were they tying the watch to their shoes? Putting it on their dog’s tail?
In the documentary, Running the Sahara, three world-class distance runners averaged 45 miles a day for several months and they were taken to the brink.
80 miles a day?
Nah.
I went down an internet rabbit hole and found out my answer:
There was a pervasive cheating problem with Fitbit.
Notably, people were putting their Fitbit on a drill (depicted above) and other machines and running them to get steps.
They were putting the watch on the end of the tire wheels. They were attaching their Fitbit to their dog’s collar. One guy was putting his Fitbit in a thick sock, tying it off, and putting it into the dryer for an hours.
And it isn’t a one off case. There are tons and tons of people cheating in Fitbit challenges. I was so deflated and thought, “This has to be the saddest, most useless type of cheating I’ve ever seen.”
It made no sense. They aren’t even getting any real credit for these competitions: nobody is even using these apps with their real names, It’s “Fitxdude933 and gobulls828”. There is no money involved. No job prospects. No medals. Nothing!
People were only robbing themselves of the exercise, the entire point of the watch. And even if they did some big Fitbit awards ceremony.
When Mr. 93 miles a day showed up, looking out of shape, and with twigs for legs, it’s going to be hard for people to believe he was logging that many miles. My experience with the Fitbit challenge taught me that people will cheat at anything and everything, even if there is no benefit, just to say they won something. There is no bar too low for a cheap dopamine hit.
Decades ago, I learned through video games — that cheating defeats the very purpose and ruins the game quickly. You don’t play games to win. You play games to figure out how to win.
This isn’t just about Fitbit challenges. It’s about how people take shortcuts in life, missing the entire point in the process. Whether it’s faking steps, inflating resumes or finding ways to bypass effort, the same pattern emerges: winning without actually winning. And those shortcuts only hurt us in the process. Our skills and focus never improve.
I have a post it I keep by my desk to help me when things are tough, and when cutting corners has more appeal. It has three lines, “I will do hard things. I will celebrate having done hard things. I will look forward to doing more hard things.”
