The Cookie Challenge

Mike suggested a few days ago that maybe this challenge would be easier if we'd agreed to log our virtual miles doing something a little less exhausting, like maybe eating cookies or drinking beers.  With a big ol' silver platter of Christmas cookies staring me in the face, this seemed like an idea worthy of consideration.  After all, with the holidays in full swing, I had a pretty good jump start on my cookie consumption...

As with so many other things in my life, my nerdy side eventually took over and I decided this idea required some analysis.  So, I ran the numbers.  It wasn't pretty.

Here's what I found:

Figuring that frosted Christmas cookies and fudge were unlikely to be readily available for most of the year, I decided to work with the regulation Nestle Toll House cookie.  It turns out that a standard homemade chocolate chip cookie has about 108 calories.  So, if one were to eat 1,399 of these little beauties, one would end up consuming just over 150,000 calories (not counting the milk that would be required to wash them down.)  And, for my 226 day challenge, I'd be eating more than 6 cookies daily.  Not only that, at 3,500 calories per pound of FAT, I'd be packing on an extra 43 pounds in 7 months.

This clearly calls for an intervention.

So, I calculated how many hours and miles I'd have to run to offset my imaginary cookie binge.  I figured on a 10:00 pace, since I'd certainly be weighed down by all those cookies.  Figuring on an average 600 calories burned per hour of running -- which is a reasonable estimate and makes the math easier -- It turns out I'd have to run a little over an hour a day and log, wait for it, a total of 1,511 miles just to offset all those cookie-calories!  That's 112 miles more than I'm doing now for the challenge.

For those of you with an inclination toward other kinds of vices, I ran the same calcs based on 1,399 beers.  It gets worse.  This time I picked Sam Adams Boston Lager at 170 calories per 12 oz serving.  That translates to 68 pounds in weight gain and a whopping 2,378 running miles to burn it off -- almost 1,000 miles more than our current challenge.  And, if you think that running an hour a day after eating 6 cookies would slow you down, imagine doing it after drinking 6 beers.  And, then repeating the whole thing every day for 226 days.

So I'm thinking that maybe my first idea wasn't so bad after all. 

Since my last post, I logged an easy 4-miler and a spinning class (aka, "Penny's Saturday Morning Torture Session").  And since I downed a few cookies while writing this, I think I'll go out for a run now...

Days 103-104, December 28-29
4 miles running, 13 miles spinning;
total miles traveled to date: 504, yes, I've crossed the 500-mile mark!
miles remaining: 895