Thursday, 5 June 2014

Time, food and distance the simple way

One of my most useful tools for planning routes out is a very simple rule of thumb for working out distance and ascent:

metres of ascent/100 is equivalent to additional kilometres.

So, if your route is 25km, and 800m of ascent, it's equivalent to 33km on the flat. This is a lot quicker to do in your head than Naismiths, particularly if you're tired and hungry. I worked out a range of different routes the Naismith way, the simple way, and how long it actually took me, and they all came pretty close, even the 100km/3500m one.

It also fits reasonably well into the calorie calculation.

Calories burned very roughly = Body weight + pack weight (in kg) * distance (in km).

This is nowhere near as accurate as my Garmin calculates using heart rate, but it's close enough for planning out food intake for 2 or 3 days. So for example, my regular wednesday training run is

(80 [me] +2 [pack]) * (24.5 [distance] + 5.8 [580m ascent/100]) = 2484.6kcal

my Garmin makes the same route 1919kcal. There's a significant difference between them, but both are subject to some error, so it's near enough as a rough guide

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