A Marathon of...
May 5, 2008 – 12:15 am
On Friday, I created a calculator where you could find out how much you're worth if you're worth your weight in gold, pretzels, crude oil, etc.
It occurred to me that some people might be a little embarrassed to put in their real weight. A bit silly since it's not reporting your weight back to me, but having to type it out, even if it's just some soulless computer script that will be seeing it, can make some people feel self conscious.
Well, the two things you focus on if you want to lose weight are how many calories you eat and how many you burn. I've done a couple articles on the calories we eat, but nothing on exercise. So today I'm going to look at the calories you burn from exercise.
A great source for this info is a calorie burning calculator I found at bodybuilding.com. It lets you put in your weight, how long you're exercising, and it gives you the calorie burn counts for over 600 activities.
As our basis of measurement, I decided to use a marathon (26.2 miles) run at 6 miles per hour by a person weighing 165 pounds. That came out to 3432 calories based on a 4 hour and 22 minute marathon time. For that same person, a few Rough Equivalents for the calories burned by that marathon would be.
- 3 hours 58 minutes of climbing a ladder in full firefighter gear
- 5 hours, 28 minutes of ultimate frisbee, synchronized swimming, or jumping jacks
- 7 hours, 16 minutes of wrestling, butchering animals, or jazzercize
- 9 hours, 41 minutes of running a snowblower, power sanding a floor, or belly dancing
- 14 hours, 32 minutes of taking out the trash, carrying small children, or miniature golf
- 17 hours, 30 minutes of clearing the table, playing catch, or walking to and from an outhouse
- 21 hours, 43 minutes of getting undressed, washing your hands, or being the guy on the road crew who turns the Stop/Slow sign.
- 24 hours, 10 minutes of playing accordion or talking in church.
- 44 hours of watching TV, sitting on the toilet, or smoking
What Rough Equivalents can you come up with for a marathon's worth of calorie burning? Post them in the comments section below.
