2007 grand prize winners: buff2@bates

Congratulations to buff2@bates, the 2007 getfit@mit grand prize winners. The team of seven, from MIT's Bates Linear Accelerator in Middleton, Mass., was chosen at random from the 134 teams that remained eligible for the award by meeting weekly exercise goals for at least 10 of the 12 weeks. Bates is a national user facility for physicists studying the structure of matter using medium energy electron beams.

Buff2@bates was the second of two "buff" teams from Bates participating in getfit this year. It was the first time teams from Bates have participated in the challenge. "We heard about getfit last year," explained buff@bates team co-captain Joanne McCarthy, "and we decided to sign up this year. We had so many people interested we had to split up into two teams."

Buff2@bates captain Ken Hatch says they tried to be fair in dividing up the teams. "In the interest of friendly competition, we didn't want all the people who exercise a lot on one team." To round things out, they also recruited family members like Hatch's wife and daughter and the husband of buff2@bates co-captain Karen Dow.

Members of the two teams said they did a variety of exercise to meet the weekly goals. Some walked outside; some went to the gym; some used exercise equipment in the comfort of their homes; and some walked indoor routes they mapped at the Bates facility. Some even walked on vacation. "It was 47 steps from the beach to our villa in the Caribbean." laughed buff@bates captain Barbara Santorella.

Some members of the Bates teams say they got interested in getting in shape in 2005, when McCarthy recruited several of them to do the "Breast Cancer 3-Day," a 60-mile, three-day walk benefiting breast cancer research. "I did the walk for the first time in 2003," McCarthy explains.

Because of some very exciting experiments with "the beam" at Bates, the winning team wasn't able to make the closing event on May 1 to pick up their prizes, so getfit organizers delivered the prizes to Bates the following week. The winners received bags embroidered with their team name and "getfit@mit 2007 champions" and filled with goodies, including gift certificates to Marathon Sports, water bottles, towels, and pedometers.

Buff2@bates

Ken Hatch (captain)
Karen Dow (co-captain)
Sherry Abreu
Scott Dow
Anne Maloney
Jan van der Laan Dong Wang

buff@bates

Barbara Santorella (captain)
Joanne McCarthy (co-captain)
Jim Kelsey
Anne MacInnis
Kristen Broughton
Bill Franklin
Carol Hatch

Onward and Upward winners

This year, the getfit organizers instituted a new prize, the "Onward and Upward Prize," to reward participants who might not always have met the exercise goal, but who entered minutes every week and showed steady and consistent improvement during the course of the challenge. Two winners were chosen at random from all those who met this criteria. Both winners received an iPod shuffle.

Our lucky winners, Deanna Card of the Huntsville Stars and Romie Littrell of Bioengineered to be Buff, were both first-time getfit participants. Card is the field security officer for the Lincoln Laboratory field office in Huntsville, Ala. She reports that before the challenge started, she would take occasional hikes or a bike ride, but during getfit she walked almost every day and joined a dance class.

Littrell is a technical assistant/lab manager in MIT's Biological Engineering Division. He says he worked out here and there before getfit started, but it having to enter minutes every week helped keep him on track.

Both winners said they were excited to have an iPod now so they can listen to music while they work out.