Okay, so what we did was pretty simple.

We decided that we could use our assumption of 3500Kcal used for a 1lb body weight change to calculate our answer.

So first I weighed myself and recorded the number.

Second, I held Ozzy and recorded the change in mass a 48 lb change in this case.

Then we went on a half hour, moderately paced, training run.

When we got back I re-weighed myself and the dog. We found a POSITIVE increase inour combined weights of 2 lbs!

What the heck!

Is that what you would have expected?

It totally surprised us.

But as we thought through the data we came up with a couple of possible explanation based on the following observation-

There were A LOT of puddles and mud along the trail.

What explanation for the data can you derive?

Also,

We really wanted to know this information in order to adjust their daily calorie intake during training- because right now they are at an ideal weight!

Should we use our test results for this purpose?

What could we do to re-structure the experiment to get better results?

Can't wait to hear what you think!

Okay well training is moving along very well for us, actually it always does at this stage.

It's the period where it first snows and we can't use the atv anymore but there isn't really enough snow for all our winter trails to open up that can really set us back.

But anyway, with a month of training in place the dogs have all lost their summer softness and are becoming lean, mean, distance athletes. This transformation is abrupt and dynamic! But there dogs, so if you don't know what to look for it can be easy to miss. Here's an example though on the human side of endurance athletics.

Well, okay it's a bit hard to tell in people too... but you can if you look hard enough- or better yet, take some real scientific data!

So with this base training in place we thought it was time to start to track the dogs weight.

There are some pictures up on flikr of this process! (just search my photostream for pictures tagged "weight") It's pretty interesting with a 60 lbs of overly excitable husky!

But anyway we got it done.

This led us to wondering about how many Kcal's the dogs use during a given run. And that led us to develop a little experiment to roughly figure it out.

Now I could just tell you what we did... But THAT wouldn't be any fun! Instead I'll tell you the tools we had to use and the assumptions we made, from there you can figure out what we actually did, if we are sound in our scientific logic, and what future experiments we might want to run!

Okay! First- What we wanted to know: How many Kcal's does one of our dogs use during a run?

Second- our only tool to figure this out was a standard bathroom scale.

Third (an assumption)- We couldn't find any research to tell us how many Kcal's a dog needed to burn to shed a 1lb of body weight but we did find that a human metabolized 3500Kcal for every pound lost. So we assumed dogs to be close to the same. Okay that's all we had to go on... What do you think we did? (I'll share what we actually did in a new post in a day or two.)