That's a Lot of Calories!

You know how some cycling computers do a rough calculation of how many calories you burn on a ride? Occasionally, I look at this data point after a ride and wonder what they have factored into the equation to get such high numbers. On the last attempt at my personal time trial I noticed that my cycling computer estimated that I burned a little over 1,000 calories and that was in the space of just a hair over an hour. This route climbs almost 1,000 feet but there’s no way you could burn up that many calories unless you were to ride it on a 70 lbs mountain bike through the snow. I’m thinking the calorie calculations may be just a little high.

Anyway this got me curious so I looked up how many calories I’ve burned up in the last year. Here’s what I saw.

Yep you read that right, 166,650! Wow, I guess it was a REALLY good cycling year. If you estimate that a pound is roughly 3,300 calories that means I burned up 50 lbs cycling in the last year.

Here are my theories of what happened to all of that weight.

- My scales are off by 50 lbs.

- I ate 50 lbs worth of ice cream and peanut M&Ms this year.

- We have a super hot clothes dryer which shrunk all of my clothes without me realizing it.

- I replaced 50 lbs of body fat with 50 lbs of mountain conquering leg muscles.

- I’m currently retaining a lot of water

- My cycling computer is a really bad estimator.

I’m not sure which theory is accurate but I think we need new scales.