I could have sworn I previously mentioned Fitocracy on here, but a quick search tells me I’m wrong. Well, a brief explanation of what it is is clearly in order.

It is primarily a site on which to track your fitness, but it has the added bonus of assigning points to all the work you do. It has some social aspects, some competitive aspects, some gaming aspects (achievements, quests, levels, titles) and I find it quite cool. I’ve been a diehard user since the beginning of December and already have two competition wins under my belt.

The first was a boot camp where we tallied only pull-ups, push-ups, crunches, sit-ups, and running. Suffice to say, I didn’t visit the gym for the entirety of that challenge. It was run over the winter holidays so I missed a few days due to travel and such, but I still eked out 5450 points to beat 2nd place (really my only competitor) by about 1200. He threw in a half marathon with a day or two to go to put himself slightly ahead, but was completely wasted by it so I put in two solid final days to build a pretty nice cushion. Over the course of this competition, my max pull-ups in a single set went from 5 to 11.

This second victory was a month-long anything goes challenge. Any physical activity earns you points towards the victory. Life certainly gave me lemons in the month of January, but I kept the goal in mind and only lost a few days to the shenigans that went down. I finished the month with 30249 points to 2nd place’s 25895, 3rd’s 17967, and 4th’s 14885. To put the points into perspective, I earned just over 1000 points the other night when I ran 3.65 miles at a decent pace and performed an hour of CrossFit. To get nerdy with that, that means I earn roughly 1000 points per hour and a half of working out. If I earned 30000 in January, that means I worked out about 45 hours over the month. Wow.

I’m currently in a third challenge, but it was almost entirely during my week of hell at work so I’m a good bit behind; I was able to muscle through working regular hours seven days a week in January while still maintaining my fitness, but working 14 hour days in early February had me not wanting to do anything other than eat and sleep. It ends tomorrow and I’m about 3000 points behind. I don’t like to not win, but I’m not even considering 4.5 hours of working out for tomorrow.

So yeah, that’s Fitocracy. It’s a novel idea and has been getting me into the gym more than ever. If you’d like an invite, click this. I don’t get anything from it and there are no hidden charges or gimmicks.