Split Personality?

[Sauron the White]

Quempel .. I respectfully ask you this --- are you a long distance runner? people who are not know nothing about it. Check that - they know less than nothing because what they think they know is wrong. There is only one way to train for long distance running - check that - ultra-long distance running. And that is to put in lots of miles.

Its basic physiology and mathematics. Check it out on the net from someone other than me so you avoid my bias.

If you have evidence of Gimli doing long distance running to train to do those 140 miles in three days please post it so I can be corrected. I know of nothing that prepared him for this.

Do you? If so please post it.

Even in American History there are stories of the pioneers walking 13-16 miles a day westward. These are men, women and children, none of which trained for marathons.

This statement proves my point about non runners knowing less than nothing because what they think they know is wrong. A slow walk - the activity you are describing for the pioneers, would be about 3 miles per hour or five hours each day. The amount of calories burned would be about 250 to 280 per hour. An average person would deplete their glycogen reserves in about two hours and then experience fatigue and soreness. For a pioneer on the road for several months, they could build up where they could do this for five horus per day.

Please note that both you and I refer to walking. Walking is a far lower burn activity that takes a far lesser toll on muscles and glycogen reserves. A fast walk burns over twice that amount or nearly 600 calories per hours for a power walker. A runner burns 700 calories per hour.

To train for a 26 mile marathon, the normal person needs a base of 60 miles per week for 12 weeks with one day off each week to rest. This gives them a base figure of 10 miles per day. Rule of thumb is that you can do 2.5 times what you train for before you completely exhaust your body and begin to tear it down. So if you run 10 miles per day for 12 weeks you should be able to do 25 miles before "hitting the wall".

Look at the physiology of a dwarf. It is completely contrary to that of a long distance runner, let alone the ultra long distance runner. Running and power walking 45 miles in a single day would require a base of 12 weeks at nearly 20 miles per day. And then you hit the wall and need days more to recover before you can exercise at almost any level. The idea of running 1.6 marathons per day for three days in a row is something that only the extremes of the elite ultra-marathoners could ever attempt and do.

If you have solid evidence that Gimli trained at those levels please present it. I would be interested in reading it.

Funny how some of us can suspend our disbelief and actually think an eyeball can float atop a tower, but a mythical dwarf can't run.

I am happy you see this because that was my exact point when I brought up the ludicrous nature of Gimli running all those miles in three days time. It was my point from the very start of this that there are those who can read the books and can suspend their disbelief at those things but when it comes to things like the Denethor plunge, they get out their charts, graphs and distance measurements and show why it was physically impossible - because it was the movie. For them Peter Jackson is something a bit less than the anti-Christ and anything they can do to heap scorn or ridicule upon his movies is considered as fair game. But when it comes to the books, they give it wide latitude and willingly suspend their disbelief at far worse things.

I simply want all of us to play by the same rules. The books and the movies cannot work unless we engage in willing suspension of disbelief. Lets just have it work both ways.