By GEORGIA WESTGARTH
IT’S ON for young and old as businesses across Casey and Cardinia hop to it for the biggest walking challenge to hit the region.
The Healthy Together Cardinia Shire’s 10,000 Steps Challenge has got 800 people walking and Gavin Staindl from Ray White Pakenham said his team is taking the challenge rather seriously.
“We want to win, we’re here to win and anything else is a fail,” Gavin said.
Participants wear a pedometer every day to monitor their step count and are encouraged to log their steps on the shire’s website daily.
Samantha Chapman from Cardinia Shire Council has already noticed more than half of the walkers registered are reaching 10,000 steps a day.
“I think it’s really popular, people are looking for ways to get active in winter and it’s a great free activity to do at work,” Samantha said.
The event kicked off on Monday 27 July in partnership with the Monash Health Community and Samantha said the challenge has grown tremendously compared to last year.
“A lot of people have taken it up – we’ve just about doubled the number of teams on last year,” she said.
Joining the challenge for the first time Gavin said it is the talk of the office.
“I’m walking around the office on the phone instead of sitting down and a team member decided to pace the hall to take a key ring off a key chain,” he said.
His team is called The Ray White Walkers and Gavin said that one of the most intriguing things was the fact that no-one knows what’s up for grabs at the end of the six-week challenge.
“We are excited to find out what it might be and have already taken more than 200,000 steps as a team over the past three days,” he said.
Eight out of the team of 13 Ray White Pakenham employees are a part of the challenge and are aiming to take more than one million steps by Saturday 6 September.
“We send out daily updates within the team on how it’s all going – it’s been quite exciting, something different,” Gavin said.
Star News Group, St Patricks Primary School and the Pakenham Early childhood centre, along with 25 other businesses in the shire, are all counting their steps toward what Samantha divulged could be a voucher of some sort.
“There will be a team winner and a work place winner and we have a range of different prizes up for grabs,” she said.
Weekly team winners will be announced by Cardinia Shire Council once their scores are known.
“We take an average number of steps from the entire team so it doesn’t matter how many people make up a team,” she said.
For more information on the challenge visit www.10000steps.org.au.
