Cycling

A New dailymile Convert

In a post back in April I lamented the end of winter, the lack of riding I did (11 days) and listed some plans for the summer. I had plans to play a lot of hockey and ride my bike incessantly, all in the hopes of losing about 10 pounds. At the time of that post, I would estimate I weighed about 173 pounds.

Flash forward to August, and a lot of that physical activity never happened. I tore a ligament in my right wrist during my first week of hockey, courtesy of an awkward collision along the boards. And I never really got out on either my mountain bike or road bike, largely due to busy weekends.

One thing I have done consistently, however, is run. I drag my sorry ass out of bed two or three times a week at 5:30 AM, and run 6.5 kilometres. I then do the same on weekends. I could definitely stand to do this one more time a week, and plan to do so as fall arrives. I’ve lost about nine pounds doing it, as I now weigh in at 164. My ultimate goal is to get to 160. (I suppose some context would help – I’m 5″8).

I’ve been tracking all this running via dailymile.com, a pretty kick-ass tool that measures how much you’ve been working out, connects and compares you to your friends, and allows you to develop a social network based on common workout interests. It’s really a lot of fun, and provides some interesting insights into your workout habits. For example, according to dailymile, I ran about 72 kilometres in July, and last week burned approximately 5.21 donuts.

One thing I can’t seem to do with dailymile, unfortunately, is track snowboarding sessions. I’m sure a day of riding on the mountain burns plenty of calories, but there’s no ski/snowboard category to file workouts under; only “other”. This is too bad, as I’ve always wondered – approximately how many burned calories is a session of freeriding worth?

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