Over the weekend my parents hiked a little bit of the Appalachian trail as a way to get out into the fresh air and enjoy a beautiful day. The Appalachian trail runs from Northern Georgia to Northern Maine, and was recently conquered by ultra marathoner and extreme athlete Scott Jurek, who set a new record for fastest assisted transit.
- Runners World - Dan Fuehrer
Jurek's trek is a tremendous display of human endurance, partnered with a bit of crazy. While talking about the trail, a question was asked, "How Many AFP would Scott have gotten if he submitted his workout to 2FNS?" That was an interesting question, that I had to know the answer to.
Some math:
Total time: 46 days + 8 hours + 7 minutes = 1112 hours and 7 minutes. Total Distance: 2189 miles Average Pace: 30 minutes , 29 seconds per mile MET Equivalency: 6 MET
AFP =
I think that is incredible to think about. We typically look for a bare minimum of 100 AFP a week, which means he worked out more in 46 days then we would in 7.7 years. I'm not sure how accurate my system is when it comes to calorie calculations, but he apparently burned ~600k calories. Is that even possible??
Kudos to him on his record breaking run, and for the rest of us, it just shows that you can accomplish some amazing things if you work at it.
600K calories over 46 days is approximately 13K calories/day, which seems plausible when you consider what Olympic athletes (I’m thinking about Michael Phelps) burn in training. I wonder, though, if the AFP is overstated because it is not factoring time for sleep, breaks, etc. Unless I misunderstood the calculation, it seems you’re calculating based on 24 hour/day activity. Still, an impressive feat that makes me feel extremely lazy.
Agreed, the 24 hour / day of activity is a bit off, which means his actual pace was substantially faster then 30 minutes, which would scale up the MET value, but reduce time of activity… so approximately ish…
Our short walk on the Appalachian Trail was quite pleasant by comparison. The top ( not to the top ) of Mt. Greylock in Adams Mass. has incredible views!
I remember the one time our car started to over-heat while driving up that mountain!