More Meat Volume 3 - Smorgasbord

Meaty morsel 1 - pace calculators:

Ally, Kelly and myself have been having some fun recently with race pace calculators to determine what pace they can realistically expect to run their fall marathons in. (I tend to be more aggressive with their goals - and I must say it's a lot easier to be aggressive when you are not the person running that has to deal with the repercussions of flaming out at mile 22. :-)

I realized that some of you (especially newer runners) may not know about the concept of pace calculators - they use formulas based on empirical evidence to allow runners to plug in one race distance and time and estimate what an equivalent pace would be for a different distance. They also have built in pace recommendations for shorter speed work and for your long distance runs. So, every one of us could get some good information by using them. For those of you running race distances you have never done before - this is a great way to plan for what you can expect.

There are two I've been using this week. This first one is from "McMillan Running" and has a very nice summary page. I liked this one! Page is here.

The only drawback I could see is that it did not have a way to do a random distance, so I had to use the Runner's World calculator to enter my Corporate Challenge time since it has a unique race distance. This one needs some extra clicking to see all the output. Page is here.

Another fun use for these is to compare your times in different races you've ALREADY run, just to see what the calculator considers your best race. It was easy for me to see what the fastest of my few 5k's as this year, but how do I know how to compare ALL of my finishes? So, I plugged in my fastest 5k (ironically, when I was leashed to 4 other people at Paige's), my corporate challenge, my Boilermaker, and my Mountain Goat times to find out that my best performance of the year was actually at the Corporate Challenge. Some time I'm going to go back through my PRs at different distances over the years and figure out my best ever performance! (I know, I don't have a life. But you are reading this, so what does that say about you? ;-)

Meaty morsel 2 - The mythical "meat sweats":

This came up at my families Memorial Day party as some non-family members had never heard of the "meat sweats". This surprised me, because it is a term that we've used often. People confused at the term led me to look up the definition online...and I was shocked to find out, that the "meat sweats" don't exist scientifically!

Then, Duerr started throwing the term around at the TRY mid-summer play night picnic and I promised him to put some information in writing at some point, just to share the shocking truth:

There appears to be no proof that the meat sweats are a real phenomenon. :-(

And for this reason, Wikipedia will not allow a page on the meat sweats to exist! Wikipedia is too good for the meat sweats! Details:

Urban dictionaries best definition has it as:

To consume an obsene amount of meat resulting in perfuse sweating.

"I went to the brazilian bar-b-que restaurant, w/ 30 different types of meat, and got the meat sweats!!!."

And it was even "The Urban Word of the Day" on August 27th of this year! That's pretty funny. But searching for a definition on Wikipedia only leads to a deleted page. And in order to get details on why it was deleted you can go to this explanation page. To save a click, it says "cannot be sourced by a credible source." and " it appears to be a newly coined neologism which might merit a mention in competetive eating but not its own article" . Doing a general search does show that the term shows up exactly once in a Wikipedia article when talking about man versus food. And since I wasn't sure of the meaning of "neologism" I had to look that up - "is a newly coined term, word or phrase, that may be in the process of entering common use, but has not yet been accepted into mainstream language."

Interestingly, the generic google search that I did, turned up a blog entry that had occurred while the old Wikipedia entry was still up. Here is the blog entry, but the best part it here - "Ali mentioned that he was having an onset of "meat sweats". I'd heard the term before, but didn't use it myself. I went on Wikipedia to learn about them, and learned a couple of interesting points. First off, veggie burgers can also give you meat sweats, which is lame. Vegetarians ruin everything - now they are ruining cool terms like "meat sweats". I hope no one changes the term because of that. ".

(I may or may not have used that just for the vegetarian hatred.)

Conclusion - the meat sweats, as real as they may seem on backyard picnic on a hot summer night, are not scientifically proven. To the point that the definition of the term is scrubbed from having a Wikipedia entry (which I did not even realize was possible until originally looking this up back in May). For those of you who want to still use the term - know that you are on the cutting edge of the English language, (and perhaps human evolution?) and through your diligent eating of meats and sweating large amounts of sweat afterwards, can someday make this world make a little more sense.