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Team Walking Program at IIT Mandi

IIT Mandi launched the team walking program last month to encourage all members of the IIT community to exercise daily to improve fitness.  Any member of the IIT community can join a walking team with four friends, colleagues or acquaintances.  For our first walk we had one hundred participants including students, professors, engineers, nurses, office assistants, administrators, wives of faculty and staff, research scholars, and parents.

Each participant uses a pedometer to record daily step totals.  Every two weeks a goal is set.  Our first virtual walk was  from Kamand to Kalibangan in Rajasthan, enjoying mountain scenery and early spring at the outset and descending to the plains near Ropar to explore several Harappan era excavations.  Of course, all participants were really walking in Kamand and Mandi.  But the virtual walk adds incentive as team members realise that their team has almost reached Ropar or Kalibangan in terms of total kilometres covered.  Hopefully, the team, the pedometer and the virtual walk encourage everyone to walk just a little more each day.

Team walking just completed its first virtual walk - 525 km to Kalibangan in Rajasthan.  Winning the first prize, ‘Fast N Furious 5’ completed 699 km. in two weeks.  Congratulations to team members, Sakshama Ghoslya, Himanshu Nandeshwar, Sudhir Dhukia, Rohit Raghav and Subhash Agarwal, all second year B. Tech students.

Coming close on their heels, ‘Speedy Stars’ won second prize, completing 642 km. The members of this team are  Ankush Sharma, Ashok Pathania, Ashok Thakur and Stuti Sharma all office assistants in administration in Kamand and  NSS field officer, Prateek.

Alka Thakur an office assistant in the Finance & Accounts dept. won the prize for best effort.  She walked 203 km. during the two weeks!

Today we have started our second competition, a walk from Kamand over the mountains to Tabo in Spiti.

Once everyone has improved their walking strength, we hope to finish the term with a real team walk to a picnic to celebrate our new fitness and friendships.