Hiking is twice as effecient as driving a car!

[magneto]

So I have time off / plane tickets to go down to Atlanta in September and hike for at least 30 northbound along the AT.

I was thinking about how much food I would need and I came to an interesting conclusion:

5000 calories per day for 30 days = 150,000 k calories = ~594 k BTUs = ~627,000 k joules = ~ the amount of energy in 5.2 gallons of gasoline.

My car gets 33 miles per gallon highway, so that means I could go about 171 miles. I am sure I will walk further than that on my AT trip (maybe twice as far), so it looks like not only is hiking better for your health, it is more efficient than driving as well!

Put another way, if all that energy were concentrated in a single Twinkie, the Twinkie would be 91 feet wide, by 325 feet long, by 125 feet wide and would weigh 93 pounds! And to quote someone famous, "That's a big Twinkie!".

[magneto]

Of course I can't edit my posts - that should be 30 days and the Twinkie would be 91 feet wide, 325 feet long and 125 feet high!

[BobTheBuilder]

Hmmmm - 150 k calories in a Twinkie means 1000 twinkies is 150,000 k calories. With dimensions of 1" x 1" x 4", a Twinkie has a volume of 4 cubic inches. 1000 of them would have a volume of 4000 cubic inches, or 2.3 cubic feet. Your mythical super-Twinkie is really only a Twinkie cube 1.3 feet, or 16 inches on each side.

That's not that big of a Twinkie.

While I'm at it, if you had to carry the same pack weight as your car, maybe about 3300 lbs, you would make a lot less miles. I'm just sayin'.

[magneto]

I think you are right on the Twinkie example. 1000 Twinkies is a lot though. You could also eat ~255 Big Macs (590 cals each).

[RWheeler]

It's pretty standard to see energy efficiency drop as speed efficiency rises. That's why automobiles are used, they're terribly inefficient in terms of energy. Do a comparison to something like a motorcycle and it'd be a totally different situation (see Bob's weight comment).

[magneto]

I know. This was just a whimsical thing. I guess I could have just drank the 5 gallons of gas and been done!

[RWheeler]

That'd be a poor way to waste $20, though.

[magneto]

It would be a lot cheaper than buying and eating 1000 Twinkies. The Twinkies just wouldn't kill you as fast...

[lush242000]

Not really a fair comparison. Your car probably weights over 1500 pounds, or roughly ten times your weight. But fun to think about.

[magneto]

It is interesting to think about how many calories we use to produce a single calorie of food for human consumption. For my whole trip, 150K calories seemed like a lot. I read somewhere that it takes about 10 calories of energy to produce/transport one calorie of food for human consumption. That 30-day 150K requirement then becomes 1.5 million.

Before I started hiking, I consumed 5000 calories per day and weighed just over 400 lbs. Now that I hike a lot, I weigh 1/2 as much, but need to consume as many calories while hiking!

[rocketsocks]

Wow,and I thought I had a lot of time on my hands,turns out I'm just not that smart.And besides.My car is on a low lead diet,hamburgers make her belch and buck.

[JAK]

It would be interesting to know who has the record for hiking the AT on the least number of calories.

[Rasty]

It would be interesting to know who has the record for hiking the AT on the least number of calories.

Probably the youngest to ever finish the trail would be my guess.

[theoilman]

Since this isn't in the hiking-humor forum (I had to scan back to the top to check) I have to wonder what kind of engineers some of you are to come up with these calculations.

How heavy is that 'super-twinkie'? By my calculation 1 ounce on my back translates to 200 lbs of pounding on my feet per mile hiked, or 2000 lbs in a 10 mile day. (Varies considerably according to the length of your pace and speed of hiking.)

[magneto]

I miscalculated the twinkie thing badly. Sorry. The Twinkie would be much smaller than I said. My dumb-ass mistake.

[burger]

Your math is off. If you were in a coma, you'd still burn about 2000 calories a day (maybe less if you weren't moving at all). So the hiking itself only uses about 3000 calories a day. When you compute it like that, hiking is even more efficient compared to driving.

[Feral Bill]

What's the deal with the Twinkies? The proper unit of food energy is the Snickers.

[magneto]

Right "Lots and lots of Snickers."

1 snickers bar = 277 k calories. 150K k calories / 277 = ~542 snickers bars. 1 snickers bar = 2.0z. 542 * 2 / 16 = ~68 lbs of snickers bars.

I would bring an extra 20 lbs to fling during the approach.

[JAK]

I belive the proper SI unit is a French pain au chocolat.

[takethisbread]

What's the deal with the Twinkies? The proper unit of food energy is the Snickers.

that's what I was thinking.