Offsetting Beer by Running
Last year, among other personal data, I tracked every bar I went to and every mile I ran. Naturally my first question is do I run enough to offset the amount of beer I am drinking (at bars)?
First we define some units. According to this Runner’s World calculator, at 8:45 minute/mile for my weight I am burning 145 calories. Google says the amount of calories in a pint of beer is about 180. Since I usually average about two beers each time I go to a bar, that simplifies the calculations. Over the course of the year, how often was I above or below the residual? To answer this, I used R and finally got around to trying tidyr which is pretty slick.
I thougth a lot about how to determine the residual but eventually settled on calories out - calories in because I felt this method made the best visualization. As you can see around week 30, I started to run more and did a better job at offsetting my beer consumption. Obviously this is an overly simplistic view of my caloric expenditure but shows some of the interesting insights that can be gained from personal data.
As always, all code and data is in this github gist