Dogs are the real endurance athletes

Last week was my favorite week of the year in Silver City. Our town is host to the five day bicycle stage race called The Tour of The Gila. It is one of the top races for domestic pro and top amateur teams in the entire country.

It's also one of the hardest races of the year. Lance Armstrong almost raced it the year he won the Tour of Georgia a few years back. Most of the locals are glad he stayed away. Too much attention from the national media for our little town.

We hosted this year's top amateur team, Team Legacy Energy, from Fort Collins, Colorado. It was really fun for me having 5 really talented bike riders and their chef stay at our house for 6 days.

My wife was slightly less enthusiastic, but she really likes "her boys," as she calls them.

I think it was Daniel, the chef taking over her kitchen that gave her pause, but when she got a taste of Daniel's cooking, she warmed to the idea pretty fast.

You would have been amazed at how much food these guys ate over the course of the week. For three of the five days, they are racing four to six hours a day and that burns up tons of calories. I would not be at all surprised to guess that they ate between six and ten thousand calories a day.

That's three to five times the number of calories most mortals eat and probably a little more than three times what these guys would need to simply maintain their weight on the low end. But just to give you and idea of what they were up against, the last race of the week is called the Gila Monster, a 106 mile race that climbs some of the longest and steepest mountain roads in the west. This years pro winner rode it in around 4 hours and 37 minutes. For those of you that are math challenged that's significantly over 20 miles and hour. I've ridden a hundred miles in just under five hours, but the terrain was flat as a pancake.

So these guys are amazing but they have to take a back seat to the canine athletes that compete each year in the Iditarod sled dog race in Alaska. No matter what you think about the propriety of sled dog racing, you have to be amazed at the shear ability of these dogs. They are metabolic freaks.

When they are not competing their metabolism is similar to my cyclists. But according to a recent article in The NY Times, these dogs flip a metabolic switch during the Iditarod allowing them to compete without depleting their stores of fat and muscle glycogen which would invariably lead to fatigue and muscle failure.

These dogs burn up to 240 calories per pound of body weight during this grueling effort compared to my cyclists burning about 100 calories per pound racing the Tour of the Gila. My boys surely lost weight over the course of the week while these dogs are able to maintain their weight during the 21 day sled dog race. (as evidenced in the pic here from Williamette National Forest) 

Truly amazing. Maybe if we can only figure out how they do it I could race next year's Tour of The Gila. Maybe if I could get a blood transfusion from a Siberian Husky I could stay up with these guys. Not that far fetched, after all my wife is always making comments about the similarities between men and dogs.

Other men of course, Surely not me.