With just a few hours left in this year’s Pac-12 Fitness Challenge, Stanford leads the conference with over 2,700 members of the University community collectively logging more than 380,000 minutes of physical activity since Sunday.
The annual initiative aims to encourage students, faculty and staff from schools across the conference to maintain healthy levels of physical activity. Participants record the amount of time they spend participating in some form of exercise over the course of the week, before school totals are tallied up and compared at week’s end.
According to Chris Spells, general manager of the Arrillaga Outdoor Education and Recreation Center, Stanford won the challenge in each of the event’s first three years. However, UCLA and Arizona State University have prevailed in more recent competition, triumphing in 2012 and 2013 respectively.
Theophilus Mitchell, an administrative associate at the Arrillaga Family Recreation Center, expressed his hope that Stanford would prevail this year.
“The other schools are bigger and have more students, but we just need people to come out and exercise,” Mitchell said. “We can win again.”
The challenge will conclude at midnight Feb. 28.