Cost and time of stair climbing

I came across a short negative opinion piece by Hamilton Nolan complaining about mayor Bloomberg's attempt to encourage people climb more stairs. The original Times pieces reads

Mr. Bloomberg said on Wednesday that he had issued an executive order requiring city agencies to promote the use of stairways and use smart design strategies for all new construction and major renovations.

Nolan replies, "Will this get you in good shape? No, it will not."

Alex Hutchinson in turn replies to Nolan's claim that although it is extremely unlikely that stair climbing will "cure" the world of obesity, every little bit helps. And more importantly there are side benefits like (surprisingly?) taking less time to get places, making for more aesthetically pleasing spaces, and maybe even safer buildings (if everyone is used to taking stairs, it sure helps when the elevator is out of order).

Such initiatives are only intended as small steps in fighting obesity (pun intended). It may help, it may not. Nolan's article claims climbing a few stairs will not get you fit. Alex sees otherwise, and has the citations to back up his view.

I for one support the expansion of stairs. If you think of the movies, stairs make for grand entrances and make a statement, whereas elevators are utilitarian; they only get the characters moving to the next scene.

But enough about design. How many calories does one actually burn going up a flight of stairs? In Nolan's piece he cites a Livestrong factoid that reads

A 150-lb person must climb stairs for 6 hours and 30 minutes to burn the amount of calories in 1 lb of body fat.

Nolan cites this as evidence that stair climbing is too inefficient to be a good workout.

Opinions and health research aside, I was interested to find out how that number was obtained, so I started ab initio to see if I could replicate the numbers. 

First of all, 1lb of (human) fat contains of about 3500 Calories of energy. In the metric world this is 14,600 kJ of energy. In terms of pure vertical energy terms, to raise an object h meters into the air costs energy of the order

E = mgh

where m is mass (kg), and g is the gravitational acceleration 9.81 m/s². But not all energy goes in the vertical direction; some is lost to horizontal motion and other efficiency considerations. After some unexciting calculations (which I decided to omit), one may say, alternatively, that for a 150 lb person stair climbing can be said to cost 0.15 Calories per step at 15 cm climb per step.

Thus to burn 3500 Calories you must climb 3500/0.15 = 23,333 steps, or 3.5 km.

How fast does it take to climb that high? The fastest run up the 320m ascent of the Empire State Building is usually around 10 minutes (at 1576 steps). That's about 0.53 m/s. At that pace one could ascend 3.5 km in just under two hours (110 min). Most people will race the Empire building at a pace about half of that (similar to how the average marathon finishing pace is around half the winning time). This would extrapolate to middle of the pack runner taking about 4 hours to reach 3.5 km and burn 1lb of body fat.

Using some novel analysis in an 2010 article, Minetti et al found for vertical ascents higher than 500m one the maximum sustainable energy output is constant after about 400-500m. A person's rate of climb (measured as power output, W) is therefore surprisingly similar for all greater heights. Factoring in some breaks that would be taken and an slower pace if not racing, we see how 6+ hours is a realistic estimate.  

Profit sharing in road races

As a races grow in popularity, so does the cost of entering. Chip timing, online processing fees between 4 to 11 dollars add to an already inflated ($40-350) race price. Although it costs money to host a race, one can guess that hosting a race if done efficiently can be a source of revenue.

Some of this money goes to road closures, to police, to race timing services, hosting expos, and pre and post-race entertainment. Some of this money also is allocated to prize money for the winners of the race. What correlation is there, if any, between the cost of races, the number of entrants, and the prize money given to the winners? I decided see exactly how much of this money goes to the the racers.

51 things to keep in mind when you run

Runners like to measure themselves. Be it miles run, calories burned, weight gained or lost, pace, heart rate there a lot to choose from. And it seems new, "important" numbers pop up as fast as we can write them down, such as lactate thresholds or muscle fibre type.  Some runners log their miles while others track their minutes. In addition, should one simultaneously track their resting and maximum heart rate? What about pace, calories burned, or bodyweight? How to choose? It's clear enough the dedicated athlete maximizes his or her information, but even the most data-oriented individuals can fall under the weight of numbers.

Compiling these metrics is not intended to clarify or rank them. What I'm hoping in gathering as many as I can is illuminating just what people consider, and is available, to measure. And it is rare to find comprehensives lists of these metrics. Therefore my main goal was to find 51 "measurable" things related to running that have been used, or recommended, by a credible source.

I present these findings in no particular order of importance, but accompanied with a brief commentary. I expect most of these metrics are familiar to almost everyone, some that only known the seasoned veterans, and a few that are relatively unknown. I've broken the list into 8 categories: Milage, Body, Shoes, Rest, Diet, Strength, Workouts, and Races.

One final warning: When including new metrics in one's melting pot pick and choose carefully. Monitoring all these variables at once is not a healthy way to train!

Quick post to prove I'm not dead

Just like everyone else's life there's lots of other things going on, but it seems to have delayed writing about anything.

Irony abounds: I got overwhelmed with things to say so I stopped writing. Usually I don't know what I want to talk about until I start writing. But as storytellers go I'm not the best, so it's hard to give a good tale about the past. Instead, here's the grocery list for May.

April: Ran a trail race, twisted ankle and got mad at myself for doing so. Stupid body.

Thee weeks later (May) I got well enough to run Bluenose half marathon. Came in second in a time of 1:11 to John Kuto, who ran in 1:09. Halifax has a lot of secretly great runners

Week after that ran two legs of the Cabot Trail relay with the Black Lungs team, a team from Toronto that I was invited to join in. (NB: The name refers to coal miners but people often think it's a group of ex-smokers). Came second in leg 2, then won leg 15. In one solid weekend there was some good male bonding to be had.

Week after that went to a friends' wedding in London, Ontario. It was effectively a class reunion of McGill Alumni, which was awesome. Open bar also great, as was seeing two longtime friends getting married.

That brings me to the present. I've also been working on a first draft of a paper for my SPARTAN project at Dalhousie. Helping guide other people's projects as well as going some of my own. During May I created the new title heading (as you'll see if you click on the link). It's a pretty sweet full-time job.

Last week I rolled the same ankle I did in April. I got mad and started pool running. Pool running is awesome, however, and after 5 days I'm almost back to normal. These guys I was running with (when I rolled the ankle) are fast guys but don't have an official club. Like I said, there's hidden talent here.

So yeah, randomly busy May/June period. I also got it into my head to maybe run the Chicago Marathon in October, health and seat sales permitting. Black Lungs people will be there, as will others. But first I must run a sub 1:11 to make the qualifying standard for a late entry (general entry is sold out). Johnny Miles is next week. Could try that one.

Also added a twitter feed to the sidebar of the site. Let's see if I can muster 140 characters now and then.

 I had this personal mandate to write when I felt like I had something worth posting. I'll try to ignore that mandate as often as possible.

Roger and me

Roger Ebert, Chicago film critic extraordinaire, died on April 4th 2013. My memories of Ebert are entirely derived through his writings. I have never met Roger in person.

I first began reading Ebert's reviews when Siskel died. That was back in 1999 and I was still a teenager watching awful movies like The Animal or The Waterboy (sadly admit I witnessed both in theatres). I had been watching the Siskel and Ebert night at the movies up until then, and it was entertaining stuff. They bickered but you knew there was a real opinion behind every comment. Every week they introduced countless new films. It would have been impossible not to tear down the walls and open up. Keeping in mind they were not professional talkers, rather professional writers, and could not BS their way through every review. I have a good BS detector and never once did alarms sound with these two. My own "to thine own self be true"-type honesty had yet to mature, and so as I watched their recommendations of good movies week after week I still would go with friends and catch the latest Sandler flick. But shortly after Siskel died, my curiosity got the best of me and wondered what Ebert looked like in writing. Back then his website was nonexistent. The domain rogerebert.com had yet to be registered (as far as I know). Thankfully the Chicago Sun Times had even then an electronic database of his reviews.

Drugs of the mind and body

I have an open-ended question to pose: Is there any moral difference between manipulating our mind versus our body with drugs? After some thought I decided within the world of work (jobs & offices), physical drugs are normal and mental drugs are everyone's dirty secret. By contrast in the world of sport it is the opposite: physical drugs are demonized and secretive while mentally altered states are the norm (or at worst redundant).

For some context on what constitutes "normal" or acceptable in Western society's drug use, here is the United States' top selling drugs of 2012:

Swimming vs running trends for four levels of sport

NB: This post is a redux of a previous discussion on the same topic. The difference this time is more reasoning behind the stats and me asking the opinions of other people. Therefore the updated results address suggestions and challenges from a few people, including Alex Hutchinson himself. I feel the questions if not satisfactorily answered are at least out in the open. The good news is that my "discovery" appears to have survived the most obvious challenges and the conclusions should now be more robust.

I wanted to find out what sort of trends, if any, appeared when taking the ratios between the top (i.e. fastest) men's and top women's ratio of times in two sports: swimming and running. I define a ratio as the following

Ratio = [Time for a woman to complete distance X]/[Time for a man to complete distance X]

For example, if considering the 10,000 m track event and a woman's time is 32 minutes while a man's is 29 flat, their time ratio is 32:00/29:00 = 1.10. Let's then take another fictitious ratio of 1500m times as 4:20(female)/3:59(male) = 1.08.

Why go to the trouble taking these ratios? To skip ahead, what I've found is that as distance X increases, this ratio goes up for running and down for swimming. Using the same two examples as above, the fictitious ratio goes up from 1.08 to 1.10 as I increase X from 1.5 km to 10km. Here my argument holds because I invented the numbers. All numbers from this point onward will be quite real. Below is an illustration of what I will soon show with actual data:

Simple enough to do these calculations, however it turned out to be more difficult arguing there was any inherent meaning the final results. Considering the above example yet again, I what have I actually shown? Another faster male might run the 1500m in 3:50, so the new ratio becomes 1.13 and my argument now falls to pieces. Or the female times are artificially slow due to low participation. Clearly I am going to need a lot of evidence to support such a sweeping generalization as "women improve with respect to men in swimming but worsen for running". From a (admittedly cursory) check with the available literature and a couple of correspondences, I have not seen these two trends discussed together. Even if the swimming/running down/up trend is well-known, it was a good exercise working with different lines of reasoning. And I imagine at least some of the data here could somehow be novel.