The Athlete's Diary

Chapter 8: Additional Calculations

Calorie Calculation (Windows)

One of the reasons many of us workout is to burn calories; naturally you want to know how many! While calorie calculation is inexact at best, it can be helpful to have an estimate of these numbers, and the Calorie Calculator does that for you.

When you select Calorie Calculator from the Special menu, the window above will appear. Using your weight (in pounds, kilograms, or stone), along with coefficients taken from the literature, the Calorie Calculator calculates the average calories you are burning each day for each sport and for all sports, using your totals for the latest week, the latest month, and for the entire year-to-date. Only workouts which are currently selected are included in the calculation.

To see the calories burned in a single day or from a single workout, use the Select By Criteria function. Set the From and To dates to that single date, and, if you just want a single workout, set the other criteria to select that workout. Now the Calorie Calculator will show the calories for that day or workout only in the This Week column.

The coefficients for calories burned are in calories per mile per pound of body weight for distance sports, and calories per hour per pound of body weight for non-distance sports.The initial coefficients for running, cycling, and swimming are reasonably well established, although you can adjust them based on your own reading of books, articles, etc. For other sports, the initial coefficients will have less meaning. Feel free to adjust them based on your reading, or based on your comparison of the effort involved in those sports with running, cycling, and swimming.
The Print, Calculate, and Done buttons should be self-explanatory.

Your weight, weight units, and the coefficients are automatically saved in your preferences file (TADWIN.INI) so that you shouldnt need to reenter them (unless two or more people are using the program on one computer). There is only space for one weight, so if your weight has changed during the year, you should just enter an average value.

Calorie Calculation (Macintosh)

Both the Log and Totals windows provide you the opportunity to see estimates of the calories burned during the various workouts in your log. These calories are calculated based on coefficients for each different sport, multiplied by the distance of the activity (for distance-based workouts) or time of the activity (for other workouts), multiplied by your weight.

Your weight is derived in one of two ways, which are controlled by the Calories choice in the Configure sub-menu of the File menu.

If you are tracking your weight in your log using a keyword, then you simply need to tell the software what keyword you are using (e.g., Wt), and what units your weight is recorded in (pounds, kilograms, or stone).

Note that you dont have to enter your weight every day if you do this; whenever the program does a calculation, it finds the weight on the nearest day to the activity in question for which you have entered a weight.

If you are not tracking your weight in your log, then you can input a fixed weight which the program will use for the calculations. After you use the Calories menu to configure this, be sure to use Save Settings to save your information.

The coefficients used for the calorie calculations cannot be modified from within The Athletes Diary, but they are written out in a text format into The Athletes Diary Prefs file in the Preferences folder in the System folder. If you feel that the calorie estimates do not agree with your own sources of information, you can edit the existing coefficients found in that file, and add your own if you wish. Calorie coefficients are in units of calories/mile/pound for distance sports, and calories/hour/pound for non-distance sports (sports for which the distance measurement is Units/None).

Equipment Use

There are three special features of the software which are contained in the Special menu.

The first of these is Equipment Use. This feature is designed to track equipment which is used continuously, such as a bike chain, or a pair of running shoes for people who wear only a single pair (for tracking shoe mileage when you alternate pairs of shoes, see below).

To use this feature, as you are entering your workouts put the word new plus the name of your equipment into the Comment field on the day you change equipment new running shoes, new chain, etc.

Now, when you want to see the total usage on that equipment since the day you started using it, select Equipment Use in the Special menu to bring up this dialog window:

Type in the name of the equipment you are looking for: NB 685, running shoes, chain, etc., and click on Calculate Equipment Use (or press Return) Starting at the latest entry in your log, the software searches backwards until it finds the phrase in the Comment of one of your entries. Once the latest entry is found, the program identifies the sport associated with that equipment, and then calculates the total time and distance accumulated on the equipment since the date of that entry.
Equipment Use only totals mileage from currently selected entries. Suppose you keep track of Cycling. You ride your road bike mostly, but when you ride your mountain bike you put Mtn bike in the Comment field. If you ask for Equipment Use on a new chain, the program will total up mileage on both bikes. But if you first use Select By Criteria to select out those workouts with Mtn bike in the Comment field, now Equipment Use will just show your mountain bike chain mileage.

Equipment Use Multiple Pairs of Shoes

Many people alternate between multiple pairs of shoes. For this situation you will not be able to use the Equipment Use feature described above, nor should you use the Keyword feature described in Chapter 4, as some people assume. Instead, heres how to do it:

When you enter your workouts, identify which pair of shoes you wore by entering the name (or an abbreviation) of each pair into the Comment field, e.g., Nike#2, NB#3. Now to calculate the mileage on a particular pair, follow this two-step process. First, use Select By Criteria (Chapter 6) and set the Comment selection to Contains the appropriate abbreviation. Now display the Totals window, and the total mileage and time shown will include only that pair of shoes. Repeat these two steps for each pair of shoes.

Target Heart Rate

The second feature available in the Special menu is Heart Rate. Enter your age, your resting heart rate, and your maximum heart rate (if it is not being calculatedsee next paragraph) in the places provided.

The Maximum Heart Rate Determination section provides six common formulae used to approximate your maximum heart rate, as well as the option to enter your own maximum heart rate directly (by selecting Use Entered Value instead of one of the formulae).

The Calculation Method section allows you to specify the simple method of calculation (Percentage of Maximum Heart Rate), which does not take into account your resting heart rate, or the more complex (and generally recommended) Heart Rate Reserve method which does correct for your resting heart rate.

The Calculate, Print and Done buttons should be self-explanatory.

Race Calculator

The third feature available in the Special menu is Race Calculator. Enter the distances youll be racing (with the appropriate letter for units like 10K if the units are not your standard ones). Enter your estimated pace in the format matching the displayed pace unit, e.g., 21.3 if your pace is in miles/hour, or 7:35 if your pace is in minutes/mile. When you click on Calculate, your total time (not including transitions for multi-sport events) will be calculated. You can change any of the numbers, and click on Calculate again. Click on Done when done. Of course you dont need to enter all three sports.