On August 5th, 2020, my friend John & I decided to try and burn 5,000 calories in a single day and this blog post will document our journey. We started by using our Garmin’s to work out what our basic calorie burn would be and how many ‘active calories’ we’d need to burn to hit the goal. For me, my resting was 2420 and John’s was 2540 (or so he thought). We made the call to try and do the challenge with workouts we enjoyed doing rather than just trudging out 30km+ of running for the easier calorie burn.
We broke the day into 3 planned workouts: a one hour run, a 90-minute compound strength session, and a 90-minute functional fitness/ Crossfit style session.
Session 1 was a moderate-intensity 60-minute run. We headed out at 8 am and ran from Ware into Hertford (see the map below). We’d decided to aim for between 5:00 and 5:30 KM splits the entire time to ensure we ran over 11km. We ended up with a 5:15/km average over the hour, totalling 11.44km and 920kcals, not a bad start!
After the run we headed back to John’s to have a snack, change, and get an hour of recovery work in before heading to the gym to do the compound session. We spent about 30-40 minutes in the cold water pool in John’s garden letting our legs recover.
We headed down to Athlon gym at 10ish and did a compound lifting session of 5x5 deadlifts at 130kg, 5x10 strict press at 40kg, 5x5 flat bench at 80kg plus warm-up and back offsets of all lifts. This was a nice easy session but with minimal rests to keep the heart rate higher than usual during a weightlifting workout. After 90 minutes we went home for lunch and more recovery time in the pool to prepare for the hard session at 3 pm. At this point, we were at around 1250 active kcals burnt, halfway to our daily total, and feeling pretty confident about making it.
After lunch, we went back to Athlon gym for a high-intensity session. We did a 5-minute bike warm-up then completed the following workouts:
EMOM10 - 4/5 pull-ups
EMOM10 - 10 push-ups + 10 air squats
7 Rounds For Time
10 hang cleans @40/30kg
10 burpee’s over bar
10 hanging knee raises
300m run
5 rounds
1 min max row + 12 KB swings at 24kg
5 rounds
20 bicep curls
max kcals on air bike while partner completes curls
At the end of the session, we realized we needed a few more calories to reach our active goal of just over 2500 so we ran a 1km lap of the field outside the gym and then headed back to John’s. When we got back and did a bit of math we realized we still needed more active calories to stay safely in our goals. I decided to head out for a quick run, John opted for a longer but easier bike ride.
By this point, we were both feeling pretty beaten up and hungry so we headed out with some friends for pizza and beers to celebrate. While at dinner John realised he’d looked at the wrong info for his resting calories and needed to get an extra 200 burnt before midnight. So at 11:40 pm after a lot of food and beers, John ran 2 last sprint KM’s to hit his goal for the day - nothing except grit and dedication at Team Grit!
Total Burnt kcals were 5040 for me and 5050 for John.
The challenge was much bigger than I’d expected especially trying to do it with fun workouts instead of the most efficient calorie burns. If we ever repeat this I’d make sure we both had chest strap heart rate monitors for better accuracy and change the workouts slightly to increase calorie burn. Maybe next time we’ll try and hit 6000…