Marathoning Matters

The Ideal Weight Calculator, Unlike Brain-Dead BMI, Takes Gender and Frame Size into Consideration!

My clear obsession with the bias of BMI lead met to search for a satisfactory calculation of ideal weight. And I finally found it here!

It isn’t built around a brain-dead metric like the BMI. This calculator makes you specify sex, for one. It recognizes that healthy men tend to weigh more than healthy women of the same height. More important, it makes you specify frame size. While you might think that getting people to accurately gauge their frame would be difficult, the ideal weight calculator has it down to a simple observation. If your index finger and thumb overlap when you encircle your wrist, your frame is small. If they meet: medium. If they fail to meet: large. Mine fail to meet. And my ideal weight when I specify that I have a large frame is as high as 160 (I’m 2 pounds under!) or as low as 144 (my magic three-hour marathon weight!).

I was feeling totally vindicated for a moment until I realized that even if I had clear proof of the BMI’s bias against large frames, and further reason to focus on attaining the weight that should lead me to a three hour marathon, I was still 14 pounds over my lowest ideal weight.

Lance Armstrong Reports Me to the FBI as a Crazed Bicycling Fan with an Eating/running Disorder who Obsesses About Lance's BMI

Lance Armstrong is another proof point for the theory that weight is a key deter­minant in long-distance performance. Although some jealous competitors claim Armstrong’s success in the Tour de France was due to illegal drugs (or the red-blood-cell-enhancing properties of cancer drugs), Armstrong himself gives a great deal of credit to losing weight during his bout with cancer.

Now, no one would recommend battling cancer as a great way to lose weight. And whatever the cause, few would recommend a weight loss as extreme as Armstrong’s as he battled for his life. Armstrong experienced the almost complete atrophy of his considerable muscle mass. On the other hand, he says this personal deconstruction allowed him to rebuild carefully after he beat the cancer, adding muscle only where he wanted it. To that end, Armstrong says he avoided workouts that would bulk up his upper body and carefully controlled his daily caloric intake to stay 20 pounds below his 1996 Tour de France weight.

Think Armstrong isn’t obsessive about his weight? In his book It’s Not About the Bike, he talks about measuring out pasta piece-by-piece and taking away the extra noodle to get the exact calorie count for which he was aiming.

Before the weight loss and the resculpting of his body, Lance Armstrong was a regular in the Tour de France but successful only as a “sprinter” (if 30-plus-ki­lometer time trials can be considered a sprint). He was never in contention for the overall endurance crown of cycling.

But his success after the weight loss makes some sense on the basis of the marathon weight/performance formula alone (a minute lost per pound gained). Imagine a stocky 10K runner good enough to get invited as an elite runner to world-class marathons who then got 20 minutes faster by losing 20 pounds.

You would think Lance had to be at least relatively skinny before his illness, right? But according to Lance’s official Web site, he weighs 165 pounds on a 5-foot-10-inch frame, and that equals a BMI of 23.7. Gadzooks! He wasn’t skinny at all, not if healthy ranges from 18.5 to 25. And if he used to be 20 pounds heavier as a world-class time-trials rider, that means he had managed to be a world-class competitor in sprints with a BMI of 26.5, well into the overweight range and higher even than my current BMI.

It occurred to me that the weight listed on his Web site might be another one of Lance’s tactics, like his (dare I say it? Yes!) feigned discomfort on the first big 2001 Tour de France climb in the Pyrenees before he blew everybody away. Could Lance be misrepresenting his weight to keep his competitors satisfied when they reached a BMI of 23?

Bingo.

Well, perhaps. There is actually some dispute about Lance’s weight. Most sources peg him at 175 for the 1996 Tour, which by BMI’s measure made him one-tenth of a point overweight. And if 175 was accurate, he weighed 155 during his first Tour de France victory.

Further research confirmed that the official 165 on Lance’s Web site is ques­tionable. Several independent sources on the Web said Lance was as light as 138 pounds during his first Tour de France win, for a BMI of 19.8.

I actually composed a message to Lance, asking him if he knew the govern­ment said he would still be healthy at 18.5 BMI, or 129 pounds. Did he also know that by dropping from 165 to 129 he would improve his Tour de France times by 20 percent (at least according to extrapolation I did with the formula I was obsessing over)? Did he further know he could improve 5 percent even if he actually weighed 138 but dropped to 129? And, by the way, Lance, which is it? How much do you really weigh?

There were several reasons I decided not to send Mr. Armstrong the e-mail. First, I didn’t know his e-mail address, although I could come up with a dozen reasonable guesses, and could certainly message him on Twitter (where I’m following his daily postings about his latest workout in Texas hill country or the Pyrenees for no particularly good reason).

Second, if my message actually reached Lance, he might report me to the FBI as a crazed bicycling fan with an eating/running disorder who was stalking him via the Internet.

Third, I’m sure exercise physiology could prove that reducing Lance’s Tour de France time by even 5 percent was not physically possible.

Fourth, as I’m continually ranting about, the U.S. government was out of line with its take on the healthy range of weight for large-framed males. 

And then, lo and behold, while searching for more reports on Lance’s weight and using Web-based calculators to figure the corresponding BMI repeatedly, I stumbled across the official Canadian government site on nutrition. The Canadians said the lower end of the healthy BMI range is 20, not 18.5. They also said that being in the 25 to 27 range was not “unhealthy” but rather “may lead to health problems in some people.”

A bit of further investigation confirmed it. The United States Government’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion had fudged the BMI figures to push its weight-loss agenda. And that meant Lance Armstrong at 138 pounds and 19.8 BMI was already perfectly lean. He clearly couldn’t get faster by dropping below his ideal weight.

In any case, Lance and his coach would pay no attention to the one-metric-fits-all BMI. They would use the scientific method to determine Lance’s true ideal weight given his unique, rebuilt body type. Besides, the real key to his success, which boosts his performance beyond the gains you can calculate in a formula, lies in native physical talent and his ability to win constant tests of will. The motto of the ancient Scottish Armstrong clan is “I remain unvanquished,” and Lance is the most unvanquished of all.

And that’s why Lance Armstrong is probably not the right running role model for me. I’ve been vanquished plenty (319th of 15,000 is the best I’ve finished in a marathon) and felt pretty good about it. I am simply not capable of competing anywhere near to Lance’s level. While I’m sure I can muster more willpower to control my eating, it won’t be with Lance’s exactitude. And clearly, even my hardest push is a joke compared with Lance Armstrong’s sheer grit. To aspire to be like Lance is to aspire too high.

No, a more appropriate inspiration for me is Woody Allen, the subject of my next blog post.

Four Reasons I Don't Believe in BMI ... And Yet Higher BMI Means Slower

Second weighty fact relevant to my marathon performance, or so you might think, is the Body Mass Index (BMI) formula, released in 2001 by the United States Government’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion and later revised to make more people index as overweight or obese. My current weight of 158 gives me a BMI of 26.3, well into the range DMI deems overweight. (I’m not very tall, if you were wondering.)  I thus seem to be part of the epidemic by which the revised BMI gauges 64 percent of all Americans to be overweight or obese.  Check out your own BMI here, but don't be depressed about it until you read this. 

Third, even when I ran a 3:06 marathon at 150 pounds and 5 feet, 5 inches tall, my BMI was just a hair below overweight despite the fact that most people, myself included, regarded me as thin and healthy. As I will continue to believe until the feds come to take me away, BMI is brain dead.

Fourth, if I lost the 14 pounds in order to hit 144 for a good shot at three hours, my BMI would still be 24, a mere point below the overweight boundary.

Fifth—and this is where it gets really interesting—according to the BMI formula, I would still be in the healthy 18.5-and-above range of the BMI if I weighed 111 pounds. And by the one-minute-per-pound rule, I would then be running a nifty 2:27 marathon.

There’s a problem with the calculation that puts a much lighter me under 2:30 for 26.2 miles, of course. If I actually got down to 111 pounds, I’d be too dead to run.