Ski Off Those Fat Tuesday Foods

What's better than Mardi Gras in New Orleans? Mardi Gras in Colorado, like CarniVail that started with a crawfish boil on Sunday. You can ski all day, party all night, and not feel excessively guilty for having one too many hurricanes, cups of gumbo, slices of king cake, or my personal weakness, paczki, a Polish form of the American doughnut.

Unfortunate or not, I grew up on these suckers, a once-a-year treat that came every Fat Tuesday to celebrate Polish heritage and Midwest tradition, and then had to figure out how to fitness fix that bad choice the following day. Burning off those calories--paczki can have 600-800 calories each depending on the ingredients--was somewhat easy as a kid who was busy swimming hours a day, but not so much now. Sitting at a desk, other priorities, you name it, and those calories are packing on instead of falling off. Unless of course I'm skiing--or running a marathon, or cycling a century.

Being that I have skiing on my mind--can I help it after being in the mountains 48 hours ago?--and it's Fat Tuesday, I combined the two for this latest installation at buzz.snow.com. Can you guess how many vertical feet you have to ski to burn off a paczki? Some calculations, measurements and a little EpicMix can help eliminate the guesswork. Perfect for the powder--and pin earning opportunities--tomorrow, right? Yeah, I think I'd opt for big mountain over Big Easy.


Photo grabbed from buzz.snow.com.