Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Technology is wonderful

Support a worthy cause for free!


As I've written before I love technology. While it’s not essential for working out, it makes the tracking and record keeping much easier. It can also help raise money for a worthy cause - World Bicycle Relief. Technically it’s not the technology itself that is supporting this great cause, but the record of our training that helps.

I could go through a long explanation in my own way, but it would be redundant since Fat Cyclist, Elden Nelson, has done such a great job of explaining how this works here. Essentially, you sign up with this awesome site, +3 Network, Join Team Fatty and then upload your training data from your device like an iPhone or Garmin. Plus 3 Network then does the math and SRAM makes a contribution for your efforts.

It really is that simple. Even with my sporadic efforts so far this year, I've helped raise over $10 for this cause. Fatty has set a goal of raising over $120,000 this year and I know we can certainly do this. This may just be the extra motivation I needed to get back to a more consistent training routine.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

CALCULATORS

I've started walking again on a regular basis and my wife has started to join me (I'm so proud of her!). As I'm doing this I'm logging my activity into both MyFitnessPal.com and MyDailyMile.com so that I have a record of what I've done and how well I'm doing. It helps me to track calories burned and fitness levels.

One interesting thing I've found is that if I walk 45 minutes at a 3.0 mph pace I will burn around 500 calories depending on which tool I use to enter that information. This is a pretty good work out for me and I'm definitely tired when I'm done. If I bike for the same 45 minutes at a 12.0 mph pace the calculators show me as burning around 800 calories. I find this very interesting because I'm much more tired after the walking than I am after the biking.

I do realize that no calculator is going to give me exactly what I burn calorie-wise while exercising, but it seems to me there is a disconnect between the 2 activities. I have a feeling the calories burned for the walking are on the low side and the calories burned for the riding are on the high side.

Regardless of the actual numbers, the important thing is I am getting up and getting active and burning calories. I know it is doing god for my body and my health and I am committing myself to keeping up with both activities.