A couple of years ago, we returned from the Dog and Gun and settled down to a cup of coffee. Jerry was dunking a custard cream, and the thought suddenly occurred to me that we might re-classify ascents by the number of custard creams they burned up!
With the aid of a biro and and old cigarette packet, I calculated that in terms of the number of Calories involved, it took one and a half custard creams to lift a 14 stone man to the top of Scafell Pike.
We considered this to be a bit on the low side, and went to bed. The topic didn't arise again until last week when I was chatting to Jerry in the pub. I decided to post the question to uk.rec.walking, and received a number of interesting replies.

1. The human body is not very efficient at converting custard creams into energy.
2. I had taken no account of wind resistance, lateral acceleration etc.
3. Alternative units of measurement could be baked beans (one small tin) and cottage cheese (1.5 Kg).

Has anybody else got any ideas on the subject?