WellTrack360
Cheating Within the Bounds of Reality
I wasn’t going to participate in WellTrack360.
I want to be clear about that. When the email came through — subject line: Your Wellness Journey Starts Now — I deleted it. Not archived. Deleted. I am not a person who tracks things about myself. I don’t own a fitness watch. I have a step counter on my phone that I’ve opened twice, both times intentionally and abandoned the same.
But then the second email came. The one with the prizes.
There would be five of them, distributed to the top five participants on the WellTrack360 leaderboard at the close of the eight-week challenge. The email did not say what the prizes were. It said they were “curated.” It said they were “exclusive.” It said they would be revealed at the BrandCo WellTrack360 Awards Celebration, which was already on the calendar as a mandatory-optional calendar hold.
I read the word “curated” and I should have stopped. I know what “curated” means when a company says it. It means someone in HR went on a procurement site and sorted by price descending until they found something that could be photographed. But “exclusive” — that got me. Exclusive means limited. Exclusive means not everyone gets one. Exclusive means someone is going to lose.
I signed up right then and there.
The first week was fine. Better than fine. I drank water. Not because WellTrack360 told me to, but because I was already drinking water and now I was getting credit for it. I logged two walks, a meditation session I found on YouTube, and something called “mindful breathing” which as far as I could tell was just breathing but slower.
The app was simple. You logged activities, you earned points. Steps were worth the least, which I thought was an interesting philosophical position for a wellness program to take. Meditation was worth more. Journaling was worth the most, which tracked — the app clearly valued activities in proportion to how much you didn’t want to do them.
I journaled. I’m not proud of it. But I did it. Three entries in the first week. The prompts were questions like “What does balance mean to you?” and “How did you show yourself grace today?” I wrote things. They weren’t true, exactly, but they weren’t false. They were the version of me that WellTrack360 wanted to exist, and I was willing to meet it halfway.
By Friday I had 340 points. I felt good. Hydrated. Centered, maybe. I almost called my dentist.
Then the leaderboard went live.
I was forty-seventh.
Out of — I checked — eighty-three participants. Forty-seventh. Below the median. Below GregT_GlobalLogistics, a man I once watched eat 3 bags of Bugles at 9 a.m. during a fire drill.
I closed the app. I opened it again. Still forty-seventh.
The second week I tried harder. Genuinely harder. I took the stairs. I drank water constantly, deliberately, like a task I’d been assigned. My deskmate asked if I was okay. I meditated twice on Monday alone. It felt like a personal record. Then I checked the leaderboard and found that KarenP_Legal had logged four meditations before noon on a Tuesday. KarenP_Legal was operating on a wellness frequency I could not identify.
By Wednesday I’d moved to forty-first. Six spots in ten days. At this rate I would crack the top five somewhere around the imploding death of the universe.
I decided it would be for the best if I started estimating.
It wasn’t cheating. I want to be very clear about that. The app operated on an honor system. It said so right in the onboarding screen: WellTrack360 is built on trust. Which means the architects of this system looked at a company full of people who lie on their timesheets and thought, yes, self-reporting will work here.
So when I logged my Tuesday walk as twenty minutes instead of twelve, I wasn’t lying. I was interpreting. The walk itself was twelve minutes, sure. But I had thought about walking for at least eight minutes before that. The intention was there. WellTrack360 didn’t specify.
Thursday I logged a meditation I didn’t do. But I was calm that afternoon, which is basically the same outcome. Results-oriented wellness.
Friday I journaled twice. The first one was real. The second one I copied from a quote I saw on a poster in the second-floor bathroom. “Progress, not perfection.” It felt appropriate on several levels.
I finished the week at thirty-fourth. Momentum.
By week four I had cracked the top twenty. Nineteenth. I could see the top five from there. Not clearly — they were impossibly far ahead — but I could see them. The way you can see an open parking spot from three aisles away and know, with absolute certainty, that someone is going to take it before you get there.
That’s when I started studying the leaderboard.
Not checking. Studying. There’s a difference. Checking is glancing at your position during your morning coffee. Studying is building a spreadsheet to track the daily point gains of your top competitors and looking for patterns in their logging behavior.
The top five hadn’t changed since week two. TravisR_Sales was in first and averaging 847 points a week. I need you to sit with that number. The maximum I’d been able to generate — even with the estimating, even with the creative logging — was 410. TravisR_Sales was doubling me. TravisR_Sales was doubling me while cheating.
MeganK_Marketing was in second with a meditation streak of nineteen consecutive days. Nineteen. Other than masturbating, I have not done anything for nineteen consecutive days in my life, including sleep. KarenP_Legal held third.
I started watching TravisR_Sales in the hallway. Not following. Observing. He walked at a normal pace. He took the elevator. He ate a burrito at his desk on a Thursday with no visible shame. This was not a man producing 847 points of wellness per week.
I brought my concerns to my deskmate Dana, she had signed up for WellTrack360 but stopped logging after week one. Dana was the control group. The uncontaminated observer.
“Do you think people are cheating?” I asked.
“At what?”
“WellTrack360.”
Dana looked at me the way you look at someone who has just asked you a question they already know the answer to. “I think the app lets you type whatever you want into a box.”
“Right. But do you think the people at the top are—”
“I think everyone is typing whatever they want into a box.”
Dana went back to her sandwich. The conversation was over. But Dana didn’t understand the nuance. Yes, everyone was typing whatever they wanted. I knew that. I was typing whatever I wanted. But I was typing plausible things. Thirty minutes of walking. A fifteen-minute meditation. One journal entry per day, two at most. I was cheating within the bounds of reality.
The top five were not operating within the bounds of reality.
I ran the numbers. To generate TravisR_Sales’s weekly output, a person would need to meditate for roughly ninety minutes a day, walk for two hours, and journal three times. You would also need to complete something called a “Wellness Power Hour,” which I hadn’t attempted because the description was four paragraphs long and mentioned something called “somatic release.”
I started checking the leaderboard at night. Not because I expected it to change but because I needed to sit with the numbers in a quiet room. To really look at them. The way you look at a bank statement after a vacation, knowing the truth is in there but needing time to accept it.
By week five I was eleventh. I had cheated my way to respectability, and it wasn’t enough. The gap between fifth place and sixth was larger than the gap between sixth and fiftieth. It was a moat. A message.
Week six is when I stopped pretending.
I logged a two-hour hike I did not take. I logged a yoga class I never attended. I journaled four times in one day — each entry a single sentence, because the app didn’t have a minimum word count, and yes, I checked. “I am grateful for this opportunity.” “Today I chose myself.” “I showed myself grace today by hydrating.” “Wellness.”
I submitted a Wellness Power Hour. I’m not entirely sure what I gained by doing it. I did however sit in my car in the parking garage of my apartment building and listened to half a podcast about the Ottoman Empire. I logged it. Somatic release.
I gained 630 points that week. My personal best. A number that would have felt miraculous in week one and now felt like screaming into a canyon. Because TravisR_Sales — the TravisR_Sales— had logged 903.
Nine hundred and three points. In a week. Into a system built on trust.
I did something I’m not proud of. I went to the WellTrack360 FAQ page and looked for a way to report suspicious activity. There wasn’t one. There was a section called “Celebrating Your Peers” and a button that let you send a virtual high-five to another participant. I almost sent one to TravisR_Sales. As a warning. A shot across the bow. I see you, TravisR_Sales. I see your 903 points and your elevator rides and your Thursday burrito. I see all of it.
I didn’t send it. But I drafted one in my head and later in my journal.
Week seven I hit eighth place. I was logging things that weren’t even in the WellTrack360 app’s categories. I logged “emotional regulation” after not responding to a passive-aggressive Teams message. I logged a seven-minute breathing exercise that was actually just me sighing repeatedly during a budget review. I logged “nutritional awareness” because I read the back of a FOCUS bar.
None of it mattered. The top five were untouchable. Their numbers didn’t describe human behavior anymore. They described something I couldn’t reverse-engineer, which meant either I was missing something or there was nothing to miss.
The final week I stopped logging. Not out of defeat — more so out of clarity. That’s what I told myself. What I actually did was stop logging my activities while I continued to check the leaderboard twice a day, which is not clarity. It’s the same practice as deleting a dating app while checking your ex’s Instagram.
I had been asking the wrong question. The question was never “how do I win WellTrack360?” The question was “what kind of person wins WellTrack360?” And the answer was: a person willing to type anything into a box. A person with no ceiling. A person who looked at a system built on trust and understood, immediately, that trust was the raw material.
I came in ninth.
The BrandCo WellTrack360 Awards Celebration was held on a Friday at 4 p.m. in the George Pemberton conference hall. There was sheet cake. The top five stood at the front and received their prizes, which turned out to be in small gift bags with tissue paper coming out of the top. I couldn’t see what was inside. Nobody opened them at the event. They just held them at their sides and smiled for photos.
TravisR_Sales looked fine. Relaxed. Hydrated, maybe. He didn’t look like a man who’d been meditating ninety minutes a day for eight weeks. He looked like a man holding a gift bag. I went home and journaled about him. Not for points. For keeps.
Ahh, ShareCare. I actually really enjoyed it. The challenges, though? They had it set up for the whole company… all the sites in the whole country. So I routinely came in 1,457th. Usernames were autogenerated unless you changed them. It chose for me “Orange Rooster”. I uploaded an appropriate photo of an orange rooster. I hid my pastry-packing shame behind my rotund, feathered, judgmental user photo.
I haven’t journaled for keeps in years. Might need to do that this week myself. Then again what’s the point when there aren’t any…points. Funny and fun piece. Also every place I’ve ever worked has replicated this very experience every time there’s any kind of competition. We do Halloween costume contests where whole departments rent professional costumes…I dont even know what that means.