The cardio of chess

So one of my old journo colleagues posted an NPR report on my Facebook page the other day, as a way of reviving an old debate we had in our Anderson Daily Bulletin days.

The debate: Is chess a sport?

My reporter friend said yes. I said no, because there has to be some form of physical prowess and/or endurance involved in an actual sport, and sitting motionless for hours on end waiting for Bobby Fischer to do something crazy didn't involve any of that.

Besides, I was the sports editor. So neener-neener-neener.

Well, neener-neener-neener on me.

According to the NPR report, top-flight chess players can expend up to 6,000 calories a day during matches. In the 1984 chess world championship, defending champion Anatoly Karpov lost 22 pounds. And in 2018, a company that tracks heart rates monitored chess players during a tournament and discovered that one Russian grandmaster, Mikhail Antipov, burned 560 calories in two hours.

This, the NPR report said, is about what Roger Federer would burn in an hour of singles tennis.

The Blob's initial reaction: The heart rate boys obviously missed the part where Antipov was playing singles tennis between moves. Also, geez, Karpov, eat an energy bar or something.

The upon-further-reflection reaction: How do chess players burn all those calories?

The Blob has a few explanations:

1. They are all Lipozene junkies.

2. Although it looks as if they're sitting absolutely motionless for hours on end, their feet, moving too  fast for the human eye to detect, are running entire marathons in place.

3. Bill Belichick is making them run wind sprints between moves.

4.  They have the metabolic rate of hummingbirds.

And speaking of Mikhail Antipov ...

5. He's actually the late Steve Prefontaine. Because, reincarnation.

In all seriousness, though, it is a mystery. I profess to know less than zero about human physiology and how it works, but I'm guessing chess players burn these incredible amounts of calories while sitting around like lumps because of the hyper brain activity chess requires. Either that, or the energy expended in staring at a chessboard without blinking for hours on end is much greater than crass laymen like myself would ever suspect.

And either that, or Anatoli Karpov was on a hunger strike at the same time he was playing for that 1984 world championship.

In any case, this does still not prove chess is a sport, in the Blob's estimation. This is because the Blob is stubborn and hates admitting it's wrong even more than Our Only Available President does. But my former colleague's argument always has mirrored my own about race drivers, whom the unlettered and unwashed don't think are athletes, either.

I always just laugh when they say that, because the one time I drove a race car in a charity event I emerged bathed in sweat with my muscles aching. And this was after only 10 laps. And it was for funsies. And it's when I was a young man who still ran occasionally and played a lot of playground hoops, so I was in pretty decent physical shape.

"It's a lot more physically taxing than it looks," I always say.

Plus it requires incredible hand-eye coordination, preternatural reflexes, vast reservoirs of physical and mental stamina ...

You know. Pretty much like every premier athlete has.

But chess?

I'm sorry. Mikhail Antipov could not outdrive A.J., Mario or Jimmy Clark. Or dunk on LeBron. Or throw a football through a keyhole from 30 yards away, while on the run, like Patrick Mahomes.

Although Antipov might be able to out-eat them.