It started as a healthy New Year’s resolution. To get back into shape and add some excitement to our routine, my wife and I entered a “steps competition” to encourage fitness. We bought matching trackers, synced our apps, and agreed that the winner at the end of the month would get a trophy and bragging rights for a year.
For the first few days, I felt confident. I was hitting the gym every morning and taking the stairs at work, but as the first week drew to a close, I was bewildered by her performance. Every evening when we checked the leaderboard, the gap between us was staggering. She was crushing me, logging 20,000 steps daily, leaving my 10,000-step goal in the dust.
The math simply didn’t add up. I knew her schedule, and despite her sedentary desk job, where she spent eight hours a day in front of a computer, she was somehow outperforming professional athletes. I began to suspect she was going for midnight runs or paced around the office during every meeting, but I never saw her looking tired or even out of breath.
The truth finally came to light when I stayed home sick one day and found out her secret. Around 10:00 AM, while I was resting on the sofa, I heard the back door open. I watched from the window as she was attaching her FitBit to the dog’s collar.
Our golden retriever, Buster, is known for his endless energy. While I was sweating it out on the treadmill, she was playing fetch in the backyard for an hour. Every time Buster sprinted across the grass to retrieve the ball, the tracker registered dozens of high-intensity “steps.” She sat comfortably in a lawn chair, sipping coffee and letting our hyper-active pet win the trophy for her. My wife wasn’t getting fit; she was just delegating the workout to someone with a lot more fur and a lot less to do.