Last time we looked at a rule-of-thumb for energy used in running. Today we’ll look at
another rule-of -thumb for the effect of runner weight on pace. There is a fair amount of wild speculation, rigorous study, anecdotal experience, and intuitive assertion about this topic, but a lot of conclusions seem to center around a time penalty of 1-4 seconds per mile per pound of body weight. We’ll look at that range in terms of energy use.
In the last two posts, here and here, we looked at the relationships between grade, power
expenditure, and pace for running. In those posts, we had to make an assumption about a “base” power use which we defined as the power required to run at a steady pace on flat ground. Since we were interested mostly in the additional power associated with running up a grade, and since that “base” power is so complicated to estimate for any particular individual, we simply invoked a common rule-of-thumb and used 100 Cal per mile as our base power. Today, we’ll explore that rule-of-thumb in a little more depth.
Last post we looked at the energy cost of running uphill at a certain pace. This time we’ll flip that around and look at the uphill pace that could be maintained for a fixed amount of power. We’ll also look at the total power required as a function of pace, grade, and weight.
Earlier, we talked about the power required for bicycling uphill. Today we’ll talk about the same effects for running uphill.
