17 Jul 2009  ::  Biker Madness
Swing and a miss on this. Earlier in June I completed my entire year of documenting my bike commuting miles. I managed to get on a bike 244 out of the 356 days, which is well below what I'd like, but I guess being out of town and a variety of injuries combined to undermine my efforts. I still ended up with 3,774.81 miles, which is a bit of a let down, honestly, but I kept good track of my records, so I feel that is probably very accurate. I really wanted 4k-5k. I did the mileage on five different bikes, three of which I still have, two others have moved on to better places.

I did find out that I really enjoy biking to and from work/school. I plan on trying to live at least five miles away from anywhere I might work because I like getting out and getting away from traffic and people.

Assuming I was getting 24mpg in the city, I saved some 420 dollars this year. Not a ton, but enough to feel like I can warrant some of my bike oriented expenditures. It also kept me in relative shape, when a bad back kept me from running.

If anyone needs help setting up a bike in the future, yell at me, and I'll help.

NERD ALERT:

I did some quick research and calculations because I am Asian and I love numbers...

Some assumptions first: I am going to assume that you averaged somewhere around 15mph. I know that you are capable of much higher speeds, but I am being conservative and I am guessing that you were not racing every time you rode. Of course I could be wrong about that. I am also assuming that you are still somewhere around 190 lbs. I am not calling you fat, but I do know that we fit each others' clothes. Read into that what you will.

Anyway, at that pace and weight, you would have been burning about 863 calories per hour (1), which works out to about 57.5 calories per mile, for a total of 217,177.4 calories. At about 3500 calories per pound (2), that is about 63 pounds.

In conclusion, were it not for your occasionally-borderline-inappropriate obsession with bicycles, you would be 253 lb right now and not the least bit attractive to any woman, with or without a uni-brow.

But seriously...

The actual reason that I crunched the numbers was as a start to an informal bit of research on the medical impacts of cycling as a lifestyle. Now I need to find out how much it costs our health-care system per pound of obesity and the total theoretical savings of 53 pounds of weight loss, etc. Thanks for spurring my curiosity.

1. http://www.nutristrategy.com/activitylist.htm
2. http://www.caloriesperhour.com/tutorial_pound.php

Comment added on 18 Jul 2009 by Chopsticks

Daniel- time for a new blog on the stats on your site. Get wit it.

Comment added on 19 Jul 2009 by paul

An additional 217,177.4 calories? I'll trust you on that. Sure, it's generally accepted that there are 3500 calories per pound of body fat, but that's not necessarily the same as 63 pounds of food, which is the angle I want to look into. Is it conceivable that $420 saved in fuel, was spent in fuel?

Now, I know this is daftly inaccurate, but let's pretend you ate all this extra fuel in ground beef. You get 800 calories for every pound of ground beef you eat (assuming 10% fat, or reasonable draining from 30% fat raw) [1]. That's 271 lbs of beef, and with beef at $2/lb, the human fuel costs more than the car fuel.

This argument doesn't hold if you ate it all in Top Ramen, but I think there is an argument here that the cost savings is controversial. I don't know what you usually eat, but lots of things are more expensive than ground beef.

[1] http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_calories_are_in_one_pound_of_ground_beef

Comment added on 19 Jul 2009 by Broin Law