On Saturday I did a “longish” run of about 15 miles. It’s hard to tell exactly how far I went since the building interfere with both my Garmin and my iPhone GPS systems. 
Anyhow, it was a fun run as I’ve tried to make all my long runs this year. I started about 9:30 am and ran downtown where Chicago was having its St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. This featured a dying of the river (see picture) and a parade. The place was packed but lots of fun. It did make joggling more challenging when I got near the crowds however, the extra loud cheers I received made it worth it.
One of the reasons I was running for a long time on Saturday was because I knew I would be going out later that day on a pub crawl. Pub crawls involve a long session of drinking in which you go from bar to bar and usually have about one or two beers at each. Since I try to count calories, I thought of my long run in terms of the number of beers I could have that day.
For me, 1 miles is equivalent to about 150 calories. Therefore, a 15 mile run meant I had about 2250 calories to “spend”. I typically drink the lower calorie beers which have about 100 calories each so my 15 mile run allowed me to drink 22 beers without worry. Fortunately, I did not have this many so my 2 plus hour long run was not completely wasted. Of course, the big plate of cheese fries that I had that day probably ate up most of my extra calories so there won’t be any weight loss from this run for me.
Measuring food rather than miles
This idea of thinking about your food in terms of how many miles it will take to burn them off has been shown to be helpful for getting people to change the way they eat. Maybe instead of calorie counts, food should be labeled with “physical activity equivalents”. So, instead of listing 150 calories on a can of soda, they could list “1 mile of running”.
Just a thought. I think today I’ll go joggle a six pack of Coke.
Joggle on
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