December 5, 2014 - It's official: UK won this year’s American Heart Association: UK vs. U of L Moving for Healthy Hearts Physical Activity Challenge. UK Health & Wellness thanks all 639 participants for contributing to our team’s victory. On our team’s behalf, President Capilouto accepted the traveling trophy from U of L’s President Ramsey during the pregame festivities of the UK vs. U of L Governor’s Cup matchup.
Though U of L reported higher numbers each week, we scratched and clawed our way into the running and eventually seized the victory in the final week in a tremendous team effort like the wildcats we are. The final step count was very close. Louisville came up big at the end of the challenge with 542,773 but we edged them out by about 10,000 average steps and posted 552,595 average steps for our final count.
A couple of milestones to point out: We nearly tripled participation from last year’s challenge with 639 participants tracking activity and boosted our total average step count by 116,853 from last year’s competition. Beyond winning bragging rights and the traveling trophy, we’ve seen this challenge positively impact people’s lives. Even though we’re just looking at 552,595 steps as the average number of steps each of our team members took over 10 weeks – we saw a whole lot of people MOVING A LOT. That is a major win to celebrate!
Improving Kentuckians’ quality of life is the main mission of the American Heart Association’s challenge and I can confidently say both of our universities more than succeeded in contributing to healthful physical activity habits. In fact, U of L also posted record numbers this year! And that can mean only one thing for next year. We’ll continue working together with U of L to do what the Cards and Wildcats do best – challenging one another to raise the bar for excellence.
