Wait, how many??

I think it's time to geek out a little bit.  Let's run some numbers just to see exactly what it takes to burn a pound of fat.  What does it actually take to do an IronMan in calories?  Is this really something that anybody can do??  Oh I think it is and I will prove it to you with a short simple calculation:

Let's take some random person and say they are about average, roughly 18% body fat and is 180 lbs.  We are going to look at what it takes to do an IronMan from this starting point.  We can look at others later, I'll even show you the calculations and how I did them so you can do them yourself!

First, let's take a look at what it takes to do an IronMan:

Let's begin with the Swim (2.4 miles):
If you take the full 2 hours 20 minutes to complete the swim, and you breaststroke the entire thing, then you're buring about 817 calories / hour.  Total of 1,879 calories for the full swim.  In and of itself, that's a major workout!  Seriously!  That's a ton of calories!!  That's as many as I ate in a whole day before I started training!  WOW!

Now the bike (112 miles):
Say you are good on a bike and can average 16-17mph for the whole 112 mile ride.  This is pretty quick, but you'll be glad you trained up to this speed when you get to the run portion of the event and the pressure is off because you have plenty of time to run the marathon.  Riding at this clip burns about 1,000 calories per hour.  It's a good clip on a bike no doubt about it.  And to go 112 miles it will take you around 7 hours.  So if we multiply it out, that's going to be 7,000 calories.  It took me about a week to fully let that number sink in.  How is there even that much energy in my body!?  are you kidding?  that's like 3-4 DAY'S worth of food!  All burned up in just 7 hours?  You gotta be kidding me.  But, believe it or not, this is not as insane a number as you might first believe.  I will show you, keep reading.

The Marathon (26.2 miles):
Now, at this point, if you've followed the times, we've got 8 hours left to finish the marathon, so we need to average 3.3 miles per hour, or a consistent 18 minute mile pace.  This is totally doable as most humans WALK at 2.5 to 3 mph, so you really only need to jog about half of it, and walk the rest.  So let's say you walk some but run most and average a 12 min / mile pace (5 mph over the course of the run).  Then a marathon would take you a little over 5 hours.  So you would burn about another 3,500 calories.

I know, there are A LOT of numbers.  If your curious, the sources for the calculations are included at the bottom for you number types.  If you add it up, this means that an average IronMan will burn about 12,379 calories!  And that, my friends, is insane.  that is about a WEEK's worth of food.  Certainly not possible to eat that many calories during the event!  How can this even be done?  Well let me show you one more calculation before this very number heavy article is done.

Again, let's take a 180 lb 18% body fat individual, about average.  This means that this person is carrying around on them, 32.4lbs of fat.  This sounds like a lot but it's all spread out over your body.  Actually 18% is not high, it's very healthy.  As a general rule of thumb, your body get's nine calories per gram of fat burned, and there are 453.5 grams in a pound.  Therefore, there are 4,081.5 calories in a pound of fat, wow!  Now, if you have 32.4 lbs of fat reserves in your body, that means you have 132,240.6 calories just waiting until they are needed, waiting to be fired off.  Holy lots-of-calories batman!  this means that if you could run on only fat, no carbohydrates or protein, then you would use less than 9% of your body's fat-energy reserves to do an entire IronMan.  And this doesn't even count any muscle tissue, or protein, or carbohydrate's in your system, or glucose, or glycogen in your blood!!!  You are literally buzzing with energy each and every day!  You are seriously a huge source of energy just waiting to be unleashed!!!  the trick is convincing our silly heads that we really are, and that means you stop listening to all the "I am tired", "I have no energy", "I can't do this", "It's to hard", blah blah blah and start listening to the truth!

TRUTH:
You are an incredible, rock-solid, unstoppable machine; built for one purpose: to be a magnificent reflection of PURE AWESOMENESS!!!!!  Let's go do it!




Nice calorie calculator:
http://www.healthdiscovery.net/links/calculators/calorie_calculator.htm

Useful look up table:
http://www.nutristrategy.com/activitylist3.htm