calories

Wednesday, June 21st

warmup + 30mins of 1 minute flat, 1 minute at 9%. This one actually felt a little easier than the 1up/1down I did at 8%. Of course, this was a total of 15 minutes (1.25 miles) at 9%. The road up Imogene pass is about 9-10% for 10 miles. ouch!

World Cup soccer was on - Argentina vs. Netherlands. Both teams were undefeated, and Argentina had a lead in goal differential so they were content with a tie. but what a boring game - there were a couple of good moments, but in general it was a yawner. I found out later both sides had players with yellow cards, and they didn't want to risk losing them for the next round.

After I finished I had done about 38 mins and just over 3 miles. The treadmill indicated I had burned ~575 calories. I always make a mental note of how many calories the treadmill calculates, but for some reason I was never curious as to how it actually calculates them. The treadmill never asks for my weight, or my age, and it doesn't have a heart rate monitor. How does it know how many calories I burn? I guess I don't really care so much about that as I do about how many calories I'll actually burn doing Imogene, and how those calories are actually calculated.

My first search turned up this table. With any luck, I'll weigh ~ 200lbs by the time Imogene starts. According to this table, I'll burn as many calories running 12 minutes/mile as someone like Doug, who weighs 120 150 lbs, would if he ran 9 minutes/mile. Hmm, that doesn't seem quite fair. Or, looking at it a different way, if we run the same speed, I'll burn 30-40 calories more every 10 minutes than he will. Over the course of a 4 hour race (our goal), that translates into roughly 750 calories. Again, it doesn't seem fair. Although I suppose one could argue that larger muscles are capable of storing more energy. Although a look at the starting line of the Pikes Peak Marathon would seem to indicate that most runners are built more like Doug than like myself.

Some more searching revealed numerous sites with calorie tables, calorie calculators, etc - but none of them describe how a calorie calculator really works. Wikipedia has an interesting looking page on exercise physiology, but I should get some work done, so I'll have to continue this post later.