Imagine it’s 2 a.m. on the Saturday of a typical hackathon. You’re sitting in a room full of red-eyed devs slumped around tables crunching code. The silvery monitors illuminate your teammate’s cringe as he throws back the dregs of yet another large Red Bull. Hunger strikes, and you reach for an hours-old slice of congealed pizza from one of the Dominos boxes that scatter the work space. It’s the middle of the night, and yet the only the things that are asleep are your legs, considering you haven’t moved from your chair in the past few hours.
Of course, great ideas are coming to fruition. But at what cost?
Enter HACKFit, a Boston-born hackathon designed to minimize the cost to entrepreneurs’ health through its fitness-centric culture. Over the event’s 48 hours, coders, students and athletes alike band together to hack the health and fitness realm, interspersing their work with play by participating in a cadre of free workout classes including rock climbing, yoga, martial arts, running and more–healthy, refueling snacks included.
Last weekend, entrepreneurs around the city headed over to the Microsoft NERD Center–and later on, Brooklyn Boulders Somerville–to participate in the first-ever HACKFit hackathon. The result?
82 hours of walking, 28 hours of running, 60 hours of cycling, 103 hours of yoga and meditation, 106 hours of weightlifting, CrossFit and climbing, and seven ground-breaking fitness hacks ready for launch, not to mention $1,500 in cash awards.
HACKFit revolves in part around the understanding that hackathons and tech development and healthy lifestyle practices do not have to be mutually exclusive, an idea that HACKFit founder and CEO Justin Mendelson knows well.
“I have always been extremely passionate about health and fitness, but have always been a huge nerd my whole life,” joked Mendelson in an interview with BostInno. “For me, they’re completely intertwined.”
Shortly after quitting his job at a medical device company, Mendelson joined up with the folks at the CIC in March to develop a social triathlete training app; however, he soon forwent the hack to work on the project that, in two weeks' time, would become HACKFit.
“I realized that at the core, I’m passionate about making the startup community healthier, but also creating a community where these active engineers and entrepreneurs can come together after a shared passion for health,” said Mendelson.
At first, the community wasn’t too accepting. “When I first started, I got a lot of pushback from people,” stated Mendelson, sharing that some told him no one was going to want to get involved in such a hackathon. “I was like, ‘that’s not true, and it’s going to be an amazing one when I bring them together.'”
Last weekend, however, the pushback was “blown out of the water,” according to Mendelson, who said that he had developers tell him that, “not only were they more productive, they were more productive, and sharper and more engaged.”
The projects that came out of the hackathon are testaments to the HACKFit's hack-sweat-launch model. Taking home the $1,000 first place prize was Simply Lift, an app that allows those looking to tone up an easy way to log weightlifting work apps, similar to how RunKeeper keeps track of runs.
Second place and $500 went to SKEJ, which functions as an OpenTable for fitness studios, and enables work out junkies to reserve spots at different specialty gyms around town from a singular account.
"I've been totally humbled and amazed by the positive attitude and the energy that came out of [the event]," Mendelson gushed. "And not only that, but the ideas that came out of it."
With the first event completed with success, Mendelson wants to host HACKFits in San Francisco, New York City, Philadelphia and Washington D.C.
Check out the other teams' final products and pictures from the event below:
