Running Speeds
allendowney.com
allendowney.com
Why do recreational distance runners care about speed so much?
Background: I went through a phase of long-distance recreational running - I ran lots of half-marathons, marathons, and even the Disney Goofy Challenge for a few years (half marathon on Saturday, full marathon on Sunday).
It was all fun! Training was satisfying, the running itself was tough but rewarding, I lost a ton of weight, got into great cardio shape, and overall, arguably, it changed my life for the better.
But I never once cared about doing any of it quickly, and I still don't. It was always about the distance and the experience for me -- could I successfully run 26 miles? (and then enjoy the rewards of being able to eat a huge high-calorie meal guiltlessly afterwards ;)
It's still about the distance -- I love cycling these days and do it regularly with a lovely group of friends who also care about moving our legs and riding, say, 100 miles in a morning, which is a challenge. But so so many other cyclists on the road as so focused on both doing it and doing it FASTER.
I just don't really fully comprehend why so many people care so much about the clock, beating other people, etc. I know I'm not alone here, but I also know I'm in the minority, so I'd love to hear some perspective.
I like hiking, and enjoy challenging myself. Sometimes I shoot for my longest distance ever, sometimes I shoot for more technicality, sometimes it's just raw elevation gain over a shorter distance, sometimes it's all of them. I rarely shoot for time, my constraint at that level is typically getting the thing done without having to camp out for the night, but I could just as well do that. I often shoot for time over elevation and distance with road cycling though.
One of the other side benefits of training for speed is that there is just no feeling like finding yourself getting faster with less and less effort. My favorite runners highs have come from taking on a hill that used to be hard, and running it both faster and with less perceived effort than previously.
I was a competitive runner in college and it's actually the reason I won't run a marathon now. I got so burned out from that career that now I just run without a watch for fun, to de-stress. If I were to run a marathon I'd want to "do it properly" and not just finish it, and that would be way too stressful for me. Even now, when I run an annual turkey trot 5k, I can't help but race the people around me and go as fast as I can despite being terribly out of shape...
I can't seem to just enjoy activities for what they are in the moment. I quickly start setting goals and being competitive. I'm also into bouldering, been doing that years but when I go to the gym I often find myself competing with others in my head (perhaps sub-consciously seeing them as a threat), I do my best not to show it but it's quite frustrating.
edit: missing word
The notion of “could I run 26 miles?” is the same to me as “could I run 26 miles in 4 hours?”
Easy runs should be easy though, and hard training runs should very, very rarely cause pain.
Speed also changes where you can go. Where I’m at, Cyclists will often meet up at 5am or 5:30 am and go on a 60km ride together before going home and getting ready for work. 25km/h and 30km/hr results in a difference of almost half an hour, which many people can’t afford to wait.
I’ve gone on century rides with a friend where we did 60km ride to the base of the mountain, then 1km elevation over 10km, then back down, and then back home totaling around 150km.
In summary, speed literally changes how long the ride takes by hours and what routes are available. You love the feeling of the wind and the beautiful views, and the longer you go the more interesting routes you can go on. Most probably have a time constraint, so higher speed = more interesting routes and more fun.
There’s also groups of people (mostly 50 and above) who are past their prime but still in the community. It’s nice to join them on bike rides during your rest days where you’re doing active recovery.
Cycling, and other endurance sports, are great in that you can go on group rides with people at different skill levels by pairing your fast days with their slow days and vice versa until you finally are able to catch up to them on their fast days.
Depending on the route (and your interest), when you’re way ahead you could perhaps cycle back to them (i.e., ride in the opposite direction), go behind them some, and then turn again and race past them. You wouldn’t have to stop or slow down then.
Qualifying times and cutoffs are a thing, so that's it for some people. For others, it's about having goals, or even just measuring progress. You might find the running "satisfying" and "rewarding" in itself, but for many that's not the case. For them, the satisfaction is not in running but in having run, and part of that is in the numbers. Times go down, heart rates go down, weights go down, whatever. Without goals and metrics, there's nothing but the grind.
And yeah, some people are just competitive. But there's nothing wrong with that either. People are just motivated different ways.
general performance: I love the idea that if I pick up a random sport to play with friends or am in some emergency situation I know I can move faster
personal achievement: it feels great to break a new personal best
time constraints: I can hit my distance goals with less time spent during training if I'm moving faster, I only have about an hour to run on week days and getting more miles into that time is helpful
Also if we are purely talking about health, doing 26 mile runs regularly is not healthy.
> enjoyment of the experience
These are subjective measurements. You decide, maybe subconsciously, whether you are feeling healthy or have enjoyed your experience.
Speed and distance are objective. An 8 minute mile is faster than a 9 minute mile. 30 miles is farther than 20 (lets keep elevation constant).
When it comes to sports, some of us are driven by those objective measurements. Sometime to beat the "other guy", sometimes just to beat ourselves.
I don't know that I can fully explain that drive to someone that lacks it. Have you ever felt driven to perform your best by some objective measurement in a non-sporting aspect of your life? School, work, video games?
However, as an ex-competitive swimmer who specialized in the sprint events, going fast is just fun, and training so you can go faster increases the fun. This can be a little dangerous on a bicycle however, caution is advised, especially as one grows older and injuries take longer to heal.
Some of us to achieve our PB. Others to BQ:
https://www.baa.org/races/boston-marathon/qualify
Some of us also engage in longer distances to find our limits. If you want a mostly chill crowd of runners, start running ultras.
Speaking of finding limits, this past weekend the backyard ultra record was broken again. It now stands at an amazing 108 hours (that's 4.5 days of running) and 450 miles:
Read Laz'[1] updates for the final 5 laps:
https://backyardultra.com/hours-103-108/
Everyone was sure Ihor was going to win. Watching the race it didn't seem possible Harvey could do it again. And then, just like that, Ihor broke and Harvey recovered. And he won himself another Backyard.
BQ = something qualify?
ultra = ultramarathons, races longer than 42.195 km / 26 mi
The people who care about speed talk about going faster, while the people who don't care about speed don't talk about it, rather than talking about not caring about it.
(Edit: typo)
One of the people they interviewed was the last runner to finish. A physician, I would guess around 45 to 50. It was already dark out! So he was not fast, maybe not much more than a walking pace, but he seemed happy so nothing to complain about.
The original book on Aerobics, the author emphasized you can get all the aerobic exercise you need at an ordinary walking pace if you take enough time. Especially important for older people and the overweight.
The obsession with "20 minutes of vigorous exercise" may well do more harm than good.
If the only reason for progression you can think of is to beat other people, and you have no desire to beat other people, how did you progress to running marathon distances while other people haven't? Presumably the was a time when you couldn't run a complete marathon, no?
To be clear, it wasn't much about beating other people except where I knew I was within reach of beating them. The ultimate goal was continuously getting my personal best.
I’m a so-so runner - I can place in AG at local races, but will never be an elite runner. But the challenge of placing, going faster than friends, or faster than previous times, is part of the fun.
I used to do a lot of 200m and the second leg of the 4x100 relay as a late teenager and I still get goosebumps decades later thinking back to some overtakes. Being faster than someone when you are both going at full clip is absolutely exhilarating. I genuinely have goose bumps now just writing this - your body doing what it was supposed to do, no thinking just doing something physically primal, the drama of the race itself, and then just blasting past someone and putting clear air between you and them. What a buzz. Watching the video in the article brought a lot of that feeling back.
These days I don't do much sprinting but it is still fun to overtake people when out on a casual 5 or 10k, even if the other person doesn't know you are racing them! :)
People want to know their health and measure its improvement.
Speed is a proxy measurement for fitness. If there is another way to measure the health improvements of exercise directly comparable among groups, I'm not aware of it. Once a runner accomplishes the feat of running a certain distance, and doing it repeatably, the runner can either go longer distance or faster over the same distance.
Yes, you can go get a VO2 max test, RMR analysis, or body comp assessment, but those are specialty services costing money and requiring professional evaluation. Not something most people can have done every weekend.
There's nothing inherent in being faster than others (or your earlier self) that would dictate speed being the obvious primary metric. Sure, it's an easy choice to measure and thus popular but on the other hand if you do want to care about speed it's mostly a losing proposition: there are always people faster than you (so you'll keep losing to them over and over or you'll learn not to care) and you can only ever get up to a certain speed that's physiologically possible with your body.
Speed can be a useful indicator of your fitness, though, much like fuel consumption is a useful indicator for whether your car is mechanically fit. But focusing heavily or primarily on speed is a choice which begs the question "why".
If I weren’t time constrained I’d def be happy continuing to jog, I feel like slower speeds are less injury prone for myself
I know I have terrible running form, but I kind of view it as not owning a fancy road bike. Sure, I'm slower on my old mtn bike, but I'm burning more calories. Now I'm wondering if that's a bad philosophy for running, after watching videos of good runners I'm amazed how smooth they are. All my bouncing up and down has got to be hard on my suspension, and new struts are expensive.
Other than track (where times are very important), I absolutely love cross country. Not sure about elsewhere, but in the UK it's still a big deal. The leagues are 100% amateur, no flashy medals or goody bags, just pure competitive running. Running is usually an individual sport but cross-country is very much a team thing. The time doesn't matter, the distance doesn't matter (it's usually not more than about 10k), but it's incredibly competitive and the camaraderie is great. The fact that it takes an enormous effort and is generally cold, wet and uncomfortable makes it all the more satisfying.
One word: Craft.
People like their craft. People wish to hone and refine. Become better. Find themselves with some level of mastery.
Speed is inherently a part of the craft of running over any distance. It's the sign you're doing it well. Your diet is working. Your stride and gait are optimal.
(Almost) anyone can run. Our ancestors were selected for it. The amount of time you do it in is the only reasonable discriminant of performance when the distance is fixed.
Why learn to paint a painting? Why learn to play a musical instrument in time, in tune, and in key? Why learn to write formal mathematical proofs? Why learn to tell a joke?
People who run faster are better at running. Why not want to be as good at running as you can be?
So the reason I go for speed is that it is a good way to challenge myself. Plus running fast is fun.
Conversely, this is also why I get so annoyed when I hear people say things like “I like dogs more than humans.” I mean come on just look around you at the wonder that is modern society. Sure there are problems sometimes but to think that we can keep this extremely complex system, entirely in parallel and distributed, from degrading into total caos is just incredible.
Perhaps focusing on dogs awesome qualities may help you not getting annoyed. You seems to value a lot complex systems, imagination and willpower and yeah some humans are great at that. Most dogs beat us flat on group cohesion, kindness and perseverance. People value that, too.
And by the way you could replace it with cats, or pets in general, the point is the same. I just think it is a very shallow perspective to look down on humanity like that. To me it signals that the person is not really looking very deep into things.
There are so many factors that go into biomechanics--I struggle to improve my own running form--but it's interesting to me that it comes together in such an obvious-at-a-glance factor as "looks fast."
When we try to figure out how to measure someones speed (say to compare Usain Bolt to another high quality sprinter) we will look at factors like height, stride length and strength. But in terms of all the factors that need to be measured to describe the function of someones running speed we also have to think of things like the speed of gravity, how many legs they have, the viscosity of air etc. Usain Bolt can't change any of these features of course so if he wants to run 3% faster he might need to be 3x as strong as another runner - since that is one of the few parameters in the equation he can influence.
I think this explains the distribution of the top speed runners performances. The olympic 100m champion won in 2021 with a time of 9.80 and a good teenager might run a time of 10.70. If you saw this on a running track as the olympic champion would cross the line when the amateur was about 93 meters into the race. That's pretty close when you consider that one runner is a professional that might be able to lift weights 3x as heavy as the teenager, they have been training for years and years with professional help and they execute the race with superior form.
This is something that I like to remember when we try to compare and measure peoples skills and how they are likely distributed in society.
Considering that 10.71 seconds is the all time Scottish national under-17 male record, I would say 10.70 would be a very good time. A one-in-a-million level of sprinting ability.
After a quick google, the men's Scottish 100m record was set in 1980 and has not been broken since so I would think that they do not devote a lot of attention to sprinting, and in 2022 only 4 runners broke 11 seconds in the 100m championships final.
If you prefer, let's consider California, population 30 million to Scotland's 5 million. According to [2] for the "Boys 100 Meter Dash Varsity" 10.7 would put you among the 20 fastest in the state, although it wouldn't quite get you into the finals (which needed a time of 10.63)
Fastest 20 in a state of 30 million doesn't sound "pretty achievable for someone who spends time at the sport" to me.
[1] https://www.scotstats.net/records/outdoor-records/under-17/ [2] https://www.cifstate.org/sports/track_and_field/past_results...
My original point being that people can run this fast and that if they do they would only be a few percent slower than the pinnacle of the sport. Even from the list you shared there most of the runners in those state finals ran 10.7 or better. Imagine an olympic final that had extra lanes for the fastest teenagers from Californian highschools. We would see a horde of 60kg teenagers that could finish the race less than a second (<10.7s) behind the fastest man in the world (9.80s in the previous olympics) over a 100m race.
So going back to your statement, it's really more like saying, "One in a million teenagers is able to run within 10% as fast as the fastest man in the world. But that 10% barrier is incredibly difficult or almost impossible to cross."
Consistency may be the largest factor in peak performance, whether physical or mental. Sure, consistency alone won't get you to the Olympics sprints if you're 4'11" or your neurons don't fire as fast as the next person's or you are prone to injury, but you certainly won't be setting the 100m world record (in the modern era) if you didn't already put in years of training, day after day, whether you were feeling 100% or not.
At the professional level, you get paired up with coaches, you get compensated (maybe), you are definitely obsessed enough to be training so hard. Of course there's a gap, and it makes me wonder just how linear the distribution would be if every able-bodied person trained maximally and effectively.
"all factors" lining up without the consistency makes you a natural talent that's quick to pick up the basics but then doesn't go anywhere.
The other amazing thing is that marathon runners seem to be faster than I can sprint, and I really don't get how they maintain it. If I could just sprint that speed, I would be going pretty fast.
IMHO the biggest factor at being fast is training fast and understanding this is a multi-year effort not a quick fix. Odds are you will need to change slightly your foot strike pattern, this is a long term project, not something that's done in a month.
Good luck.
- practice barefoot occasionally, and pay attention to how your form changes. You’re more likely to just naturally land on your forefoot when you’ve no shoes on. Now try and maintain that when you put shoes on.
- move your legs faster. Seems simple and obvious, but most people when they try to run faster don’t actually move their legs faster. They extend their stride (more likely to increase heel strike) and try to drive more acceleration off each push. You’re training for power, not speed. Focus on a higher cadence, which will probably mean you need to make a conscious effort to take what feel like _smaller_ steps.
And make sure to ease yourself into it gradually. Easy to go into it full-pelt and do lasting damage to things like your Achilles and knees.
I would add that “barefoot” means, literally “barefoot”. I had convinced myself that “barefoot shoes” would be sufficiently the same because I was running outdoors and didn’t have the guts to do actual barefoot. I recently bought a new Assault AirRunner (curved motorless / manual treadmill) and run on it actually barefoot. The difference in my running form and sudden introduction of new muscle soreness makes clear how even barefoot shoes affect form.
Off-topic side note/rant: it is incredibly annoying how the Apple Watch becomes wildly inaccurate when on treadmills. GymKit has been out for years and has no - zero! - uptake among home treadmills and even shockingly low among commercial treadmills. And shame on Assault Fitness for creating an expensive, commercial level manual treadmills with an app that can see the data via Bluetooth from the treadmill, and failed to integrate HealthKit to sync the data. Wild decisions.
Apple falls to Garmin in two areas: battery life and software. Sleep affects recovery, so planting a watch on a charger every night is a non-starter. Garmin's performance analysis software is also years ahead of Apple's. Apple could fix both of those things but that would require investment which I'm not sure they are willing to make.
Well, maybe (though I highly doubt it is 1% of the runner market) but it is by far the biggest player in smart watches generally now, and they are quickly eroding the feature advantage gap with those other brands. And most of the users of the brands you mentioned are serious runners whereas the average person walking into a gym bought their smart watch for a broader set of reasons than a serious runner buying a Garmin. It would make sense for a manufacturer of equipment to appeal to the average person walking into a gym.
> Apple falls to Garmin in two areas: battery life and software. Sleep affects recovery, so planting a watch on a charger every night is a non-starter. Garmin's performance analysis software is also years ahead of Apple's. Apple could fix both of those things but that would require investment which I'm not sure they are willing to make.
I wear mine all night and get the sleep info. I plop it on the charger while I shower and eat breakfast and it is full by the time I am ready to start my day.
Honestly the only complaints I have with my Garmin is the best kind of complaint to have: they last so long. My previous forerunner I had for 12 years. This Fenix must be close to 5 already. I keep looking at these new ones and I just can’t justify it. Battery life is still many days, features are still great. It’s just an absolutely rock solid watch that doesn’t actually need to be upgraded. Which is ultimately why I chose a Garmin instead of an Apple Watch last time - I didn’t want another Apple device that might be on a 3 year upgrade cycle.
1) Foot strike to far in the front as in [1] and [2]. This mostly happens because people want to run fast, and therefore take longer steps. It is very counterproductive though. A longer steps lowers your center of gravity, and because the foot strikes the ground very far in front of the COG, you need to lift your COG before you can do the next step. This is visible in the video of the article as well. The amateurs have a much larger vertical movement of their heads and torsos than the Freeze.
2) Insufficient leg extension at the end of the ground contact as in [3] and [4]. There are two reasons for that. The first one is connected to the point above. If you keep the COG very low, you are forced to bend the hip and the knee while you move your torso over your foot. It's very hard to extend hip and knee after that, so many people just lift the leg instead of pushing all the way through. The second reason is mobility. Sitting all day shortens the hip flexor muscles (M. iliopsoas). Stretching them helps a lot.
Many of the people in the video are also starting quite fast and get considerably slower over the course of those 160m. Tiredness might be an important factor there.
[1] Bolt, foot strike: https://imgur.com/a/QOQaEX2
[2] Amateur, foot strike: https://imgur.com/a/Pmiijgx
[3] Bolt, leg extension: https://imgur.com/a/mRCq7uc
[4] Amateur, leg extension: https://imgur.com/a/cxzMkEi
it seems link [3] with Bolt's extension is broken
Ed Whitlock in his 80s:
https://mindmotionmatter.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/ed-runn...
It’s more interesting because I sprint “properly”, but my brain just flipped when I started going further.
Squats, deadlifts, and cleans will help your explosive power a lot; for this, your probably want low reps, high weight, and long recoveries. If you can periodically go to a track and run 6-10x100m ‘all out’ w/ 4-5 mins rest, that would be good too.
For an example lifting plan: https://www.stack.com/a/sprinter-workout-program/
Before doing any kind of data analysis, it's worth considering if your datapoints are even refering to the same thing.
In the end I think what this tells us is that in the general population there are many distinct subpopulations with different distributions of running speed. I would expect that if you start conditioning on things (e.g. gender, age, level of fitness) things start looking a lot more normal, rather than log-normal.
You might not be able to beat the Freeze simply because you're not a young fit male who trains to run fast. Really nothing surprising here.
Now, maybe in real life there are far too many factors and we're only holding a few constant so the math doesn't apply, but I do think the math is valid.
The thing is a while back I took a look at the times achieved by competitive athletes at the 100m dash (from worldathletics.org), and they looked normally distributed. Intuitively that made sense to me - many other human attributes are normally distributed, so why not this?
He's explaining why something is, using stats.
You're probably overthinking it.
Did I mention I think Allen is totally great yet?
Seriously though, Allen is an instructor. These are educational pieces to bring a spark of understanding and creativity to students. I don’t think he is aspiring on modeling the absolute truth in these posts.
This piece has a learning about the working of non-normal distributions in sampling and reasoning about cut-off points.
No model is perfect, but I don’t have the slightest clue why you think that would follow.
Also, Ethiopian runners would be a counterargument. It's just reading way too much in a model that probably was there before the data. Seeing how everybody defends it as "learning", the example was sought to be described by the model.
Wat. His model says that many factors have to be perfect for someone to be as fast as Usain Bolt. If anything, it implies the opposite of what you said
My eldest is 10. He is good at math because we do math games all the time. I can’t get algebra to sink in properly yet. Doesn’t really click in the time we have and with the teacher he has (me). But in Python he is giving variables a name all the time. Perhaps there is something about programmatic math that helps, not hinders education.
On the hinders side though, I can understand it being confusing to try to grasp:
y = x + 2
You could def y as being x() + 2, but you might just be delaying the confusion to when you try to introduce functions in math and find yoursel saying 'no no that was just a hack to get python to behave more like algebra'.
Is there any language that allows this I wonder? Where you can do something like:
y = &(*x + 2)
It might be tempting to think it's procedural vs declarative, but it's not really, you could procedurally evaluate that y should now be maintained to have such value. Admittedly you can't really do it any other way on declarative terms. But what allows you to do computation like that? Datalog maybe?
I'm ignoring Matlab/Octave/etc. because I'm not that familiar and of course (I assume) they work more like math. What's interesting is that everything else seems to do it differently; I'm not sure why or how that happened. Is it as simple as an early limitation (in terms of early computation and compilers) that stuck?
You could, I guess, in any language that allows operator overloading (Python would be a good one) define operators that actually return a function for computation, guess. This just seems like a really complicated way of defining a function, though.
Or possible a template library like Eigen could be thought of in terms of “building a computation.” Maybe CUDA has something like this? I’m not sure, at all.
An aspect for my case specifically, which is probably not a coincidence, is that I usually work with Electrical Engineering students. They’ll typically have seen some very light Verilog in some of their intro classes. I’m definitely not a Verilog expert, but you can use it to define combinatorial circuits—in that case you are literally describing the wires and gates that the computation flows through, so the left hand side does change based on the right hand side, continuously. At least until you write to a clocked register. And of course in a real circuit, there’d be some signal propagation time…
1. The data he fits is for distance (10k), and the conclusion ("why you can't beat the Freeze") concerns sprinting.
2. The claim that speed is a multiplicative model is fine and I agree based on the 10k data. But the people running against the Freeze aren't uniform from the population, so the argument is missing a step about what distribution (what percentile of the background distribution) they might be from.
3. There are some interesting numbers about how the high school girl is x% faster than Downey, the boy is y% faster than the girl, etc, but they don't link to the stats later in the article.
Of course I might be wrong (maybe people in my general area are just incredibly slow)? But I’d have some confidence in the assertion anyway.
I can well believe there are multiple factors that goes into being able to make it through such a test or being very fast. We just don't understand these genetic factors yet.
Yes, there is this thing as mental fortitude and you can even train it to persist to run hard, especially when you "kick" at the end of a race.
But this only helps to a very small degree, the most of the result is due to more mundane aspects like your experience with running, your running efficiency, your aerobic capacity, your additional fat you are carrying with you, whether you have been running regularly recently, etc.
I am regular runner (10 miles every morning). If I have an injury and are out of running for two months, I will have very hard time at the same speed and duration as before the injury and no mental fortitude will help me get the same result come race time. My mental fortitude counts for less than my last two months of running history.
Even just a tiny bit of experience with running can dramatically improve your results. And that is not necessarily by improving your fitness. I remember when I started running I would get large increases in results every single day. I was very proud of myself until somebody told me this is normal and has nothing to do with my fitness -- my brain is getting rewired to coordinate my movements better and this helps running efficiency. Another important aspect of running you learn within first days is how it feels to be running at a sustainable pace. If you don't have any experience you are very likely to run too fast, accumulate lactate and be unable to finish the distance or have to slow down considerably. Because you don't have any idea how hard is appropriate for the challenge and your ability.
And one more argument against mental fortitude. I think it has very little value the better you are at running. The better you are at running the closer you run to your physical limits and once you understand it, the brain alone cannot make you run faster if your body simply is not able to produce required output.
If you observer Eliud Kipchoge, for example, beating yet another marathon record, you will notice he is feeling good and smiling throughout the race and at the finish line. Yes, there is probably some pain and discomfort but really, he is just executing a meticulously prepared plan. The work has already been done and he can't run faster than his ability and he knows is ability to perfection. He knows if he runs even a tiny bit faster than he should, it will actually put him above his ability and produce a slower result. There is maybe last couple miles where he is judging his reservers and decides whether to run a tiny bit faster or stay at his plan and that's about it.
I had to use mental fortitude to finish my first marathon (when my body cut the power at 20 miles), but that's just because I was undertrained and unprepared. Now when I run I know perfectly the pace I need to keep to finish the race and there isn't temptation to "push it" because I know if I do this it will produce a worse result.
(yes, I know running long distance like 5k-42.2k is very different from sprinting. I am just an amateur who runs a lot who is also a nerd and want to understand a lot about everything I do.)
Holy cow! That's pretty impressive, I run only like 35 miles a week during the peak of my marathon raining blocks.
The distance is only one factor, the other factor is intensity. If you keep intensity low you can increase the volume a lot.
Most untrained people get their heart rate up to zone 2 by just walking a little faster or in more difficult terrain. But they can easily walk fast for an hour or two. The only difference is that I have to be running to get to the same level of exertion.
My runs are all easy and enjoyable and I don't have to fight myself to go out and I feel perfectly fine right after the run. I run 10 miles because that's about 1h 15-20 minutes which is the most I can pack into my busy morning. I am using that time to rethink some stuff, listen to the news or audiobooks so not all time is lost.
An interesting feature of running is that if you do it correctly you can be quickly progressing to doing things that couple of months ago you thought impossible. For example, what once was a very strenuous run was an easy stroll couple months later, if I did things correctly inbetween.
Another example, for years I had trouble with my Achilles tendon which would flare up every time I reached particular weekly mileage (about 20-30 miles). For many years I thought I am never going to be good at this, but then I got an advice from my physiotherapist to do some strength training and calisthenics targeting my Achilles and my problems suddenly went away. From then on I understood it is all about problem solving and I am a nerd.
It might be also a reason for not making any progress..
If you practiced pull-ups every day, you would become very efficient at pull-ups and possibly double the number you can do. At the same time, it isn't impossible for seemingly related measurements of strength (such as the biceps curl and deadlift) to get worse as your body "overfits" its adaptation to the pull-ups.
But in sailing in 10 Beaufort or climbing in extreme weather it is all about mental fortitude not physical strength or training. Some people just quit, give up and others stand at the steering wheel for 6 hours despite soaked clothes and blowing gale.
Interviews are bidirectional information exchanges - the company is also pitching itself to the candidate during the process.
What I mean by giving up is what happens when a person loses the will to fight.
In running, it is your own body that is testing your mental fortitude. To be more specific, it is the extreme physical discomfort one experiences while training and competing. And unlike life-or-death extreme weather, you really can quit at any point. It is a totally optional activity at all times. So yes, it requires quite a lot of mental fortitude to keep doing something so physically unpleasant, every day, in pursuit of a personal goal.
Anton Freeman : Vincent! How are you doing this Vincent? How have you done any of this? We have to go back.
Vincent : It's too late for that. We're closer to the other side.
Anton Freeman : What other side? You wanna drown us both?
Vincent : You wanna know how I did it? This is how I did it Anton. I never saved anything for the swim back.
Vincent : There's no gene for fate.
I measured the speed - the run was mostly around 10-12 km/h, the sprint around 18 km/h. I'm not a fast sprinter at all, but I was in my late twenties and maintained this schedule for a while and figured I might be average or better.
To put this in perspective, a marathon at 18 km/h is about two hours and twenty minutes. The world marathon record has been below that since the 1930s. There are lots of people who can run for two and a half hours faster than I could sprint.
Why would anyone be surprised they do so much better?
Bicycles make humans incredibly more efficient at travelling over paved surfaces. Pretty much every sort-of healthy person with a bike would beat the fastest runner over 10k. That's crazy in my opinion.
It was a promotion with a funny name, essentially a race. Not permission to actually steal by any means.
We recently had a friend of my daughter's at my house who was (at the time) 14, barmy 6ft tall and threw javelin for the UK county..
We took it in turns throwing a ball for my dog and it was like she had a ball launcher built into her arm.
You are going to need a multiple of factors and some of those are luck but many are innate skill and hard work etc. Maybe connections.
However making a million (being slow) should be achievable to most!
There is a lot of effort put in to make athletes faster. I doubt Usain Bolt would be under 20s on a dirt track.
First of all, to make use of these specialist shoes you already need to have perfect running mechanics. You already have to be good at recovering good amount of the energy using springiness in your tendons and muscle and then the shoe will help with it. If you just put your foot on the ground and then pick it up a moment later, it will do nothing for you. So that probably already makes these shoes do nothing for something like 3/4th of all runners.
Second, these shoes are extremely expensive and the sticker price doesn't tell the story. Not only they are something like 50% more expensive than top of the line other shoes, they also get used up very quickly, something like 5 times faster. So you could say they are probably about 7 times more expensive than even most expensive regular shoes.
Third, it just does not make any sense! When I run, I am racing against my own times. Yes, I want to be better at running and having better time gives me joy and makes me proud for my accomplishment. For my hard work I put into it. What difference does 1% of improvement make if that improvement was totally artificial? Rather than use these shoes I could just take calculator and calculate the result to include 1% artificial increase in performance and it would cost me much less.
It only makes sense if you are racing against other people and that does not include you or me.
That said, the effect, for me, only matters at full marathon distance. I don’t see any point in wearing any of those shoes for the average weekend 10ker.
I’m also a fairly avid runner and I’m going to call BS on that.
There’s a ~14 second difference in world record times between track and road in the 5k. Track surface technology is a real thing, just as shoe technology is.
There’s a big difference in shoe technology between road and track too, primarily in terms of the amount of super foam allowed which in terms of the shoe is generally what seems to provide the most benefit.
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/20-000-ye...
That's why most professional sports organizations have specific standards for fields, tracks, equipment, etc.
On the last part the author was comparing Bolt's time to that of the collegiate record and The Freeze's PB, all three of which were probably set on higher-quality tracks.
But, some records might include factors likely wind direction, which might add an asterisk to indicate a special condition.
I’m not a huge runner but still find myself using it all the time, both for my own occasional running goals and to satisfy my curiosity for questions like “how quickly would an elite sprinter’s pace finish a marathon?”
Nice explanation of the difference between additive and multiplicative.