Tiffany Austin only signed up for Argus’s fitness programme because she thought she might win a trip.

It was a fair mistake, the eight-week challenge the insurance group was offering was called European Expedition.

Ms Austin was disappointed to learn the only trip on offer was a walk around the block — several hundred times; the equivalent of the distance between Holland and Greece.

Still, she loved it.

The 27-year-old is now on her third Get Up & Thrive challenge. Argus offers three a year to staff and clients.

One of Ms Austin’s goals is to conquer the Lindo’s to Lindo’s Walk, as her first attempt didn’t go so well.

“I thought, it’s really only a short distance between Lindo’s in Warwick and Lindo’s in Devonshire,” the senior analyst with the Bermuda Monetary Authority said. “I took a little bottle of water and a hat and regular exercise shoes. My water ran out before I even got to Paget. Luckily, there were water stops. My friends left me behind. I was a bit miffed by that because they were all older than me.”

She was thrown a curve ball when she reached Brighton Hill in Devonshire. She got to the bottom and thought the walk was almost over.

“That’s one sneaky hill,” she said. “It is straight up. It just kept going and going.

Now, I want to go back and try again to see how much my fitness has improved.”

Ms Austin thought she was reasonably fit when she signed up for Argus’s challenge last year.

She boxed twice a week and walked.

“I was fairly active,” she said. “The trouble was I wasn’t being consistent.

“Some days I would make the bare minimum of 10,000 steps per day. Other days, if I had a boxing class, I would have about 14,000 steps per day.”

For this year’s challenge, Level Up, she is doing an average of 11,000 steps daily and is hoping to increase that to 12,000 before the end. She also gave up boxing and is instead taking pole dancing, aerial yoga and Pilates classes.

“The pole dancing is a lot harder than it looks,” she said. “You need a lot of upper body strength, which I haven’t got yet. I also started doing a lot more with my friends.

“We would go walking after work or do yoga on the beach in the summer.

“It was a change from our daily routine.”

She doesn’t believe in weighing herself, she measures her success in the little things.

“Every now and then when I am taking the four flights of stairs to my office, I have flashbacks to how things used to be,” she said.

“When I first started the European Expedition I would take the stairs but I would be at my desk afterwards, just chilling, because I needed to catch my breath. I don’t need that anymore.

“Now, I can just climb those stairs and have a conversation as soon as I get to my desk.”

Seventy BMA staff members enrolled in Argus’s challenge this year. They’re assigned to teams and pitted against others to win prizes.

Ms Austin’s team hasn’t won a challenge yet.

“The other people in the team have done challenges before so they know what to expect,” she said.

“I think we are pretty good at motivating each other. Right now everyone is motivated, but it might be more difficult at weeks five or six.”

The hardest part of this year’s challenge has been tracking her activity, Ms Austin added.

“We have a pedometer that logs our steps. You can also calculate the equivalent steps from other activities such as boxing.

“I take a picture of my pedometer at the end of the night and then reset it before I go to sleep so it is a fresh count from the start.

“Doing the activity isn’t hard, it is carving out those hours to do it that is hard.

“It is particularly difficult with this challenge, Level Up, because you increase your exercise every week.

“But you set your goals, so you have to make them manageable.

“It is a balancing act and you have to really want to do it.” The beauty of the challenge is that it forces participants to focus on getting healthy for at least eight weeks, she added.

“For eight weeks I am very dedicated to what I am doing. When those eight weeks are up I am just as conscious, but maybe not tracking as diligently. It is just putting you in the frame of mind to be more conscious of what you are doing.”