CAUTION- This post contains high levels of nerdiness!
For all my stats-loving fitness nerds out there, can I get a hell yeah!
As I have mentioned on my page before, I like numbers. I also enjoy multiple outdoor endurance disciplines. My salivary glands get especially active when I’m pouring over data from any of my trail runs, hikes, bike rides, etc. My mother tells me it’s borderline obsessive, but she just doesn’t get it!
For all my comrades who enjoy the intersection of fitness and data, this post is for you. Especially if you enjoy longer runs, hikes, or bike rides that contain a lot of elevation gain.
I’ve long been slightly frustrated over the fact that I couldn’t easily compare trail runs that had differing amounts of mileage and elevation gain. Is a 17-mile, 3000-foot elevation gain run better than a 14-mile, 4000-foot run? Hard to compare the two. But for me, not knowing was simply too unsatisfying.
I’m happy to announce I recently had a breakthrough on this. It came to me when I was trying to fall asleep the other night; unfortunately, once the idea hit, I couldn’t go to sleep for a while after that (I was just too excited!).
Enter the new statistic that I created. This statistic captures mileage and elevation gain (“vert”) and spits out one wholesome, reliable number. I call it: The Burly Index.
Why Burly?
Burly is an adjective I came across shortly after moving to Colorado in 2020. It was explained to me by a good friend of mine- Zach- a friend who also loves to get after it in the outdoors. If it doesn’t make sense to you, there are alternatives. Beefy, gnarly, fat; anything that implies what you just did was a heavy load. There’s some real weight to what you just did out in the mountains, and now you can have an objective measure to describe just how burly it was.
How Does it Work?
It’s a simple equation. To normalize distance (miles traveled) and elevation gain (vert), I wanted to increase distance by two orders of magnitude, aka 100. For most cases, this will give your distance and vert the same number of digits- they’re on the same playing field.
From there, I added in vert, then divided that number by 2 to get an average between the two. But hold on: something was off. As it stood, the Burly Index gave the same score for a 20-mile, 4000-foot run and a 40-mile, 2000-foot run.
No no no. The 40-mile run will be way harder than the 20-miler, even with less vert (running 10 more miles is significantly harder than adding 1000 feet of vert). I needed to give more weight to the running distance.
Therefore, I upped the multiplication value to 200.
Okay. From there, you add vert and then divide by two. That’s it! You now have your Burly Index. Written out, it looks like this:
Burly Index = ((dist*200) + vert)/2
Let’s do a quick example. Say you went for a 15-mile trail run with 2000 feet of elevation gain. Pretty burly, right? Well…just how burly? Plugging those numbers into the equation:
Burly Index = ((15*200) + 2000)/2= 2500
Not too shabby! As you can guess, this number is strictly for comparison against yourself. It’s too easy to go on Strava and find other people who are putting up crazier numbers than you. Who cares? It’s more fun to compare yourself to your past self and beat previous Burly scores.
This index can be used not only for trail runs but also for hikes and even road runs.
What if I Prefer Biking Instead?
I’m glad you asked! In that case, the Burly Index will be modified slightly. Since it is much easier to accrue a lot of miles in the saddle, we don’t need to weigh the distance traveled as much. Instead of multiplying by 200, we drop it back down to 100. The rest of the equation stays the same:
Burly Index (for cycling) = ((dist*100) + vert)/2
Pretty simple. That’s all I have for today- try and apply this statistic to previous runs/hikes/bikes/etc and enjoy having a new objective lens through which to view your burly, beefy, gnarly outdoor adventures!
Stay tuned for more fun posts like this one!
John Phillips 