Early yesterday afternoon, I (briefly) contemplated a pre-Storm-Of-The-Century outdoor run pushing my bundled-up three-year-old in a jogging stroller we've owned since the Clinton Administration. Later, after sanity reasserted itself and I got onto the treadmill , I got to thinking about the biggest, most important questions in all of running: (1) How many extra calories, if any, do you burn while pushing a jogging stroller anyway? (2) How much grade do you need to input on a treadmill to simulate a given flat-land outdoor pace accurately? and (3) Just how accurate are treadmill calorie counts, anyway?
Of course, my usual treadmill run consists primarily of a decidedly dissonant combination of "things I do to distract myself from any contemplation of the time elapsed or distance run" and "things I do to parse and analyze time and distance data in every imaginable way while running." Thus, I'm often a particularly schizophrenic combination of assiduously looking away from the display (I find that duct tape works very well, though the gym manager isn't happy when he sees me walking in with a roll), and assiduously peeking then performing long division in my head to obtain net pace, calories per hour, calories per minute, and calories per mile. And no, rounding to the nearest tenth is not acceptable.
It's not "obsessive-compulsive." It's "intensely curious."
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