The second gunman on the grassy knoll? Maybe? Maybe not. Explore with me the facts of one professional’s humbling experience and come to your own conclusion about whether this group here had anything to do with it.

From left to right are super triathletes and TriScoopers Moonpie (I’m ripped), HolisticGuru (Is there quinoa in this drink?), Strouter (I’m not drunk, I used to be), Rambonie (I’m finding about my nature) and CindyJo (Yes, I have multiples of this grateful dead t-shirt, so back off).

To begin this story, let’s work our way back to July 19th when Desiree herself posted this on her blog:

Good morning everyone! I have been a little tardy with my journaling and I still have all the nasty details in my head from Ironman CDA so I will have to come back to that one….

I am about to go jump in the lake out here in Lake Placid, NY. It is the day before the race and I am optimistic that I will come back from the mistakes I made a few weeks ago and have a solid race. There is some great competition up here this weekend and the hilly course is a feat to conquer in itself. We have thunderstorms for the last two days so hopefully those will hold off for us until the run portion. A rain shower on the run always feels nice.

At that point Desiree was looking like this:

At some point between lunch and dinner our mild mannered TriScoopers were innocently day drinking at Charlie’s, a popular hangout on Main Street in Lake Placid, when in walked Desiree Ficker. According to witnesses, Desiree walked up to the host and asked to obtain food, fuel, sustenance and necessary nutrition for her upcoming race. Before Moonpie could jump up to invite her over to the table, the host had apparently ignored this professional triathlete’s pleas for food (Think Oliver holding his bowl out) and sent her on her way. Where she went, no one seems to know but as you can read from her blog entry above, she was still in a very fragile state of mind and the denial of food only contributed to her performance on race day. How poor was her performance you ask? Here is a quote from Ironman Live:

Desiree Ficker gets across the line
“She hasn’t had much luck at this race, has she. Desiree Ficker isn’t one to quit, though — she walked her way across the line here today, as she did three years ago.

Our spotters just told me that when they saw her she was shaking and her lips were blue at the turnaround.

It obviously wasn’t her day, but she certainly toughed this one out!”

In my mind, this couldn’t be any simpler. Charlie’s is directly responsible for Desiree’s poor performance. At the same time, the host was summarily dismissing her, our TriScoopers were being offered another round of drinks ON THE HOUSE. Why, you ask? Obviously to distract them from helping out this poor athlete.

By favoring the intoxicated TriScoopers over this professional athlete, they virtually guaranteed that Desiree would bonk during the marathon the following day. Did Moonpie bonk? NO! Did CindyJo bonk? NO! In fact, Nathan Miller (not pictured here) beat Desiree by fifteen minutes on the run and he clearly has the means to compensate the owners of Charlie’s to act like they didn’t know who she was. Didn’t know who she was? RIGHT! Please take a look at the picture above and tell me that you wouldn’t remember her face. So the question remains, did Charlie’s act on their own, or was there an outside influence that contributed to this unconscionable act?

I’m not saying that there was a conspiracy here but I think that the truth needs to come out. Desiree needs to be vindicated and at the least Charlie’s owes Desiree a pitcher of margueritas on the house.

It turns out that “biological engines” — which is what the muscles in your body are — are pretty amazing in terms of efficiency. To find out how efficient, let’s look at how many calories a person burns while riding a bicycle.

If you look at a page like this calorie chart, you will find that a person riding a bicycle at 15 miles per hour (24 km per hour) burns 0.049 calories per pound per minute. So a 175-pound (77-kg) person burns 515 calories in an hour, or about 34 calories per mile (about 21 calories per km).

A gallon of gasoline (about 4 liters) contains about 31,000 calories. If a person could drink gasoline, then a person could ride about 912 miles on a gallon of gas (about 360 km per liter). Considering that a normal car gets about 30 miles per gallon, that’s pretty impressive!

To be fair, keep in mind that a car generally weighs a ton or more, while a bicycle weighs only 30 pounds. Cars also travel a lot faster than 15 mph. But it is still an interesting comparison. Note also that people cannot drink gasoline. However, people can drink vegetable oil, which contains nearly the same number of calories per gallon (if you look at How Fats Work you can see that fat contains long hydrogen/carbon chains just like gasoline does).

The people riding in a race like the Tour de France are riding more like 25 mph. Because air resistance rises very quickly with speed, they are burning about three times more calories — something like 100 calories per mile. In a 100-mile stage of the tour, a racer might burn something like 8,000 to 10,000 calories in one day! So they are getting only about 300 miles per gallon. The only way to replace those calories is to eat a lot of food

So like every good coach, I submersed myself in data until I found the data that I liked the most and here it is. Forget Avi’s stellar 2:51 Boston Marathon finish where he knocked off 19 minutes from his former personal best, while at the same time setting two half marathon PR’s in the same race, with a 1:26 in the first half and then a 1:25 in the second. I have found out that I will die when I am 89.9 years old, barring getting hit by a car while running or cycling. More importantly, I’m going to be healthy until I’m 74.1 years old which means that I can almost walk the marathon and still qualify as the qualifying time for a male between the age of 70 - 74 is 4 hours 30 minutes. Whoooohoooo. I might even get JetPack and Rambo to run it with me at that pace.

This test also told me that I’ve banked 11.4 years although I’m not quite sure how that works since it says that I am right now the equivalent of a 37.5 year old, which is roughly 6 years younger than my actual age. They also tell me that I can add 5.5 more years to my life, but since I’ve already banked 11.4, I’m saying “No Deal” Mr. Banker. I can get more than that 5.5 years all on my own just by watching less reality television. I firmly believe that watching The Hills sucks life out of you. Rock of Love, on the other hand, can only help to stimulate healthy living.

My one concern is what will I be like between age 74.1 and 89.9? Will I be drooling or in a wheelchair? That’s a long time for my life to suck, which is another reason, I’m not anxious to live longer, I’m anxious to live healthier longer. I guess the moral of the story is that as long as I stay under 5 hours for a marathon, I’ll once again be able to run in that great race. Time to go swim with the BQers at the JCC. There’s probably a few wrinkly guys over there I can coach down to that 5 hour time limit.