This year GATX took part in the Global Challenge for the first time and sent 12 teams each of 7 employees on their travels: During this competition, international teams count their steps over 100 days with the objective of covering the longest distance. During this year’s challenge, our team, „Justice League“ covered an incredible 10,406 km – that’s more than 100 km per day! And in doing so took first place within GATX!

The Global Challenge is a worldwide health challenge: Worldwide, each of the teams taking up their starting positions has 7 members. At the end of May, 2018 the teams lined up for a virtual journey that was to last for 100 days. During this time, each team member measures his bodily activity – each individual must take at least 10,000 steps every day. As the stated aim of this programme is to create more awareness of personal health and to promote more physical exercise.

Naturally, this is only possible in a team, after all, not every member has time for this sporting challenge every day. And so this competition is also about working together and motivating each other. This ability to work in a team and the efficiency resulting from it are also important for our dealings with each other and for our cooperation with our customers – when all’s said and done, we at GATX always want to improve and make our customers even happier and more satisfied.

More than 16 million steps!
This year, nearly 40,000 teams took part in the Global Challenge: Our 7 GATX winners, the sports aces, Philip Wagenknecht, Maciej Piatek, Jürgen Jedlicka, Marko Davidovic, Jürgen Diernegger, Grzegorz Stanczyk and Maciej Maciejewski managed 16,259,525 steps in total and with them took the 1,327th place worldwide. When you consider that 39,644 teams took part, this is a very good result and one to be proud of! During the competion they travelled virtually from Peru via Argentina and Brazil to Africa and on to Europe, to the Midddle East, to India, China and Japan and finally to Australia. In the process, sporting activities such as, for example, swimming or cycling were also included – here, the activities were converted into the corresponding number of steps. And along the way the participants have permanently changed their habits and now, for example, prefer to take the stairs instead of the lift.

We congratulate our team on this excellent result and are very pleased about this level of engagement – we will most certainly be taking part again next year!

More information about the Global Challenge can be found under https://globalchallenge.virginpulse.com/