Lets say I am able to maintain a 500 calorie per hour burn rate for 14 hours per day for 50 days. That’s works out to 350,000 calories burned + 81,200 metabolic maintenance for a grand total of = 431,200 calories. If I’m consuming 7000 cals per day (350,000 calories of fuel), that would equal a deficit of 81,200 caloires. If 3000 calories = 1 pound of body fat, then I would loose 27 pounds of fat over the 50 days. Most ocean rowers loose very close to that amount.

The problem is, I’m not sure I will have 27 pounds of fat to loose! My ‘race weight’ is 148 pounds (that’s very lean for me), and recently I’ve put on 13 pounds of muscle and fat by starting weight training again. I used to weight train, so because of muscle memory, it came back very fast. I would like to gain an additional 6 to 10 pounds before July, so I might be OK. I wonder how much energy is in muscle as opposed to fat? (as used as stored fuel in the body).

Anyhow – sorry for rambling on. I wanted to do this math anyhow, so thanks for listening. About your own calorie issues – I would think that if you are certain that you are burning 8000 calories a day, and also certain that you are eating no more than 8000 calories, you should not be gaining weight. What I have found is that as we become more efficient at our exercize, we don’t burn as much as we think, or used to burn. Do you use SRM watts meter? You can do a pretty accurate calculation when you use your average watts produced along with your body size.

I have also found that when I’m training hard, my appetite is huge. You don’t realize that your portion sizes are increasing and the amount of times you snack is more frequent. Over time, a few hundred additional calories per day really adds up.

Here is a trick I use when I need to drop a few pounds before an important race, and I don’t want to dust off the exell spreadsheet to start logging my cals in/out. Everytime I feel like snacking, I eat nuts. That’s it – and I eat all the nuts I want. Nuts are calorie dense and contain plenty of the good endurance fat. But for some reason I always loose weight when I stop snacking on the carbs.

When I qualified for Kona, I did a fat load diet 2 weeks leading up the my big race. I lost quite a bit of weight even though I was carefully taking in every single calory I needed. For some reason (not carb depletion – researchers have accounted for that), all subjects who have tried this research in research mysteriously LOST weight. Let me see if I can dig up an old blog post:

5. Fat loading diet

I had been reading the research on fat loading and I thought it could be especially applicable to an Ironman distance endurance event. The diet is basically 50 to 60% fat with the remainder carbohydrates and protein. You eat like this for 6 to 7 days, then 2 days of strict carb loading then compete in your endurance event. The fat loading process does 3 things:

1. It teaches your body how to burn fat instead of carbs because there is so much fat available from your diet and so little carbs.

2. It makes the fat more readily accessible for energy because the diet is so rich in fat that it becomes available as gobbles floating around in your muscle cells.

3. Since you have restricted your carbohydrate intake for 6 to 7 days, when you do start eating carbs, your body super-compensates and stores more carbohydrates in the muscles that normal. This excess of fat and carbs can be used on race day.

The research has shown an average of 4% gains on endurance and this 4% is considered a non-significant increase because it isn’t over the 1.8 standard deviations that chance would permit. However, if the 4% is consistent enough from experiment to experiment then a 4% increase could be statistically significant (not enough research yet) and 4% on an average Ironman finishing time of 11 hours is almost 30 minutes which is HUGE. Also, the endurance time interval on the experiments I have read about are all much shorter than Ironman. I believe the diet could be more effective for longer ultra endurance events.

You could do Highwood Pass (320 km) on Friday, May 28 … then I’d pick you up 3:45 am on Sat – drive 2 hours to Castle Junction … and we’d be riding at 6am.

Does the timing work?

I do think it would be good to spend some time in some big breaking waves with a chase boat nearby. This will tell you if your rudder and keel are sufficient for storm duty.

Control and speed both depend on how much weight is in the boat, but also how it’s distributed. You’ve probably looked at this, but you would like to maintain front to back weight balance as you use up your supplies.

Nearly all your energy production in this endeavor will be from free fatty acids (FFAs).

When it comes to mechanical efficiency, most agree that the human body is on par with a good engine, at about 25-28% efficiency. Most power meters will use that percentage when they calculate your calorie burn.