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Learning basic math lessons from doughnuts, bicycles

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SCOTT AIR FORCE BASE, ILL. --  Adapting to the new Air Force Fitness Program has forced me to learn a lot of strange new things over the past six months - some things I wish I never knew.

A lot of that has to do with math. Math and exercise are two things most people don't really enjoy - so we avoid them when we can.

However, I've learned riding an exercise bike in the fitness center for 20 minutes or so can burn 250 calories, because the little red lights between the handlebars tell me so. That's a good thing.

Unfortunately, in watching the TV news stories while riding my bike, I also learned that the average doughnut has almost the same amount of calories. Looking down at my belly, this tells me that my personal doughnut-to-bicycle ratio favors the doughnuts. That's a bad thing - but I'm working on it.

Another thing I found out while getting 'Fit to Fight' is that a mile and a half is longer than it looks. When you're whizzing around in a car at 60 miles an hour, it only takes a minute and a half to travel that far.

In sneakers, a mile and a half is at least five miles long. Maybe more. I'm still checking about that.

I think Einstein's Theory of Relativity said something about this phenomenon. Somewhere in that "E equals MC-squared" business is a law that says miles in cars are much shorter than miles in sneakers. I'm hoping maybe for next year, I can find a place where I can run my mile and a half in car miles - because sneaker miles are just too darned long.

I think Einstein's theory also covers doughnuts and waist sizes, too, but I'm not going to dig out a slide rule or solar-powered calculator to tell me just how many doughnuts it takes to make my jeans feel too tight.

However, I have learned that the fewer doughnuts I've eaten, combined with more time on the exercise bike, has lowered the sneaker length of the mile and a half and made my jeans appear to grow (or my belly shrink).

Somewhere in all this learning, I've discovered a mathematical formula to improve overall physical fitness.

I call it the "Unified Theory of Doughnuts," or "D equals B plus M-square (plus or minus J).

The Unified Theory of Doughnuts (or UDT for short) says that for every doughnut (D) consumed, I must ride the exercise bike (B) for 20 minutes (M). If I fail to do so, the overall length of the mile and a half run will increase and my jeans (J) will feel tighter.

Now, I remember a time, back when I was 16 years old, that a mile and a half in sneakers was the same as a mile and a half in a car - and my jeans fit really well. If that is indeed true, I can figure out how many more doughnuts I've eaten than times I've spent 20 minutes riding the exercise bike.

Let's see, I'm 38 years old now. Currently, running a mile and a half in sneakers feels like running about five miles. That would mean the square root of my waist measurement, divided by something, equals a really big number.

Of course, my wife has simplified the math equation of the UTD into one easy corollary: "Put away the box of doughnuts and get your tail to the gym, or you'll fail your physical assessment."

My wife's an accounting major, generally good at math and skinnier than me, so I accept her hypothesis as generally sound.

Mathematically, this is true because according to the UTD, if D = 0 then the amount of time riding the bicycle and the apparent length of a mile and a half will remain the same as well.

Of course, I still have to work out how much time I need to make up for in the last 22 years when the doughnuts I ate far outnumbered the trips I made to the gym. I think solving this particular problem will require one of those 16-digit scientific calculators.

The final thing I've learned in the last few months is that I'm not the only person who could benefit from the proper use of the Unified Theory of Doughnuts. There are a lot of us out there who have high doughnut-to-gym ratios.

Trust me, it takes a lot of exercise bicycle time to work off 22 years of unaccounted for doughnuts. The best thing you can do if you find your waistline is violating the UTD is to put the doughnuts away, or at least spread them out along the mile and a half run at really long intervals.

As for me, I have to go back to the gym. Fortunately, I think I've worked off more than six months' worth of doughnuts in the time I've been working out at the gym. This tells me that vigorous exercise may reduce the time needed to remove the doughnuts from my system. I like the results, but I think that means I'll have to work on the math behind the Unified Theory of Doughnuts again. I guess that's a good thing.

Once I work out all the mathematical details regarding this doughnut-to-miles and jean size theory, I can start to work on my next project: The Chocolate-Covered Pretzel-to-Push-up formula.