This is for my friends who are runners and racers, I think you might like it. Wolfram|Alpha announced last week that it has added data for a variety of physical activities. But this goes way beyond “You worked out for x minutes so you burned y calories.” Of course it does, since it’s Wolfram|Alpha…

Start at http://www.wolframalpha.com and put something simple in, like running for two miles. You’ll get a screen that looks like this:

As you can see, W|A invites you to provide more information, and if you haven’t yet it assumes you’re a 25-year-old, 160 pound male. The default allows W|A to provide you with several additional sets of data, including estimated calorie burn, speed (hey, how many yards per second am I going?), pace, distance, and time. I can enter a slightly different search:

running 12 minutes at 4 mph

This adds another table of information called “Race Predictions,” showing how long it would take you to finish a variety of race lengths based on the speed you specified (8 hours and 13 minutes for a marathon, for example.)

You can also ask W|A questions about exercise, like this:

how long to burn 110 calories

W|A will present you with a list of available activities (over 300 of them!) and once you choose one will give you a table of calories burned, though you will have to specify your weight. If you just enter the query burn calories and put in your physical data it’ll give you a baseline of how many calories you’ll burn a day at different levels of physical activity.

There are some limitations to how you can access this new data in W|A. I could not, for example, figure out how to compare two activities to see which one burned calories fastest. Nor could I enter a query like burn 100 calories in sixty minutes and get a list of activities which would burn that many calories based on my physical information. But if you’re looking for exercise estimates and some nifty running information, check out this new dataset from W|A.