I See Running In My Future
Written by Michael on March 9th, 2008Though I MUCH prefer cycling over running, I was never really bad at it and have now added it to my routine to give my ass some time to recover from the bike and to burn calories a lot faster.
Using the Bodybugg (God, I hate that name) has been a real eye opener for me in terms of my caloric burn. For example, you can clearly see that I burn significantly less calories on the bike (even while riding for hours at my lactate threshold) than I do while running (at a pace I can easily sustain for an hour).
At my LT, I’m burning approximately 10 calories per minute (2 rides here).
When running, I’m burning about 15.2 calories per minute.
While this isn’t surprising, I’ve learned that running can be a real help when trying to maintain a 1,000 - 1,500 calorie per day deficit. I needed to take today off the bike so I went with Amy down to 24-Hour Fitness and ran on the treadmill for an hour (30 minutes at 165+ bpm) and it went pretty well. I’m not really a gym person but finding flat roads to run on here is just about damn near impossible. It’s not the uphill that kills, it’s the downhill.
So far, so good on the weight loss front. After a two sketchy weeks, I’m finally starting to drop. About a year ago, I was 269.5 and I checked in this morning at 217.0. Goal weight is 180 by the last Sunday in July and 170 by the end of this year. After that, I’ll just want to maintain and work on my power output (more on using a power meter this week) and getting back into racing next year. My motivation is a little different than most peoples. Instead of wanting to look good, fit into certain clothes or be healthy, I just want to go faster up hills. I’ve already got decent power output and if I can change the "mass" part of the equation, I can be competitive again.
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I’ve always found running to be more “intense” than cycling. Back in my cross-country days (high school), when I was doing both, I had always noticed this. Even when going all out on the bike, there’s something inherently intense about running.
Could be that you’re less skilled at running, so your body is less efficient.
I don’t know about this bodybugg thing. Measuring the body’s energy usage is not a trivial thing. Just look at the setups they use in sports medicine.
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heh, I’m definitely less skilled at running. Though I ran varsity cross country in high school, I was always a lot more competitive on the bike.
For me, I find it much easier to push myself on the bike. When running, the only stress placed on my body is on lungs. I ran cross country in high school too and always looked at practice and racing a breeze compared to my cycling. Probably because you spend so much more time on the bike.
As for the BB, I agree and was very (and still am) skeptical of it’s claims but it does have some value in that it forces me to literally account for every calorie and it does a good job of detecting my physical activity that aligns with my perceived exertion. The internal pedometer is pretty accurate (tests of 25 steps in my basement). I estimate that it’s probably ± 15% for calorie burn and that’s close enough for me. But again, the real value of the thing is the way it makes me think about food. I still wouldn’t recommend it at this point until I can gather some more data and see some real results.