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Can a 10x marathon runner finish 26 miles in less than 1 hour? How about 10 minutes? There _are_ gaps between skill levels, but from personal experience, no one

Can a 10x marathon runner finish 26 miles in less than 1 hour? How about 10 minutes? There _are_ gaps between skill levels, but from personal experience, no one is substantially worse or better. We are after all just flesh and bone...

Consultant32452 5y ago
The average marathon run time is about 4.5 hours. The world record marathon run time is 2 hours. Most people who run cannot even complete a marathon. Then there are ultramarathons.
- alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  > Then there are ultramarathons and then there's Mauro Prosperi
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Can a 10x marathon runner finish 26 miles in less than 1 hour? That’s the wrong analogy because marathon runners are already the 10x-ers of movement. The average person could cover the distance of a marathon, but it would take them many days of walking and resting. A marathon runner can finish a marathon in around 5 hours. That’s an order of magnitude faster than an average person, so yes, they are 10X-ers. Most people can walk, but few people can cover so much ground so quickly. That’s the essence of the 10X designator. The average programmer is not like the average marathon runner.
- acdha 5y ago
  I think your comment inadvertently illustrates how much of this comes down to how you define the baseline. I think the comparison for a world-leading marathon runner shouldn't be someone who _never_ exercises but someone who's actually put some effort into fitness (say, an amateur runner) — yes, they're faster but it's nowhere near 10x[1] — just as our baseline for a 10x developer shouldn't be someone who's never written a line of code before but the median professional developer. It's easy to get an order of magnitude win over someone who's completely inept but once you get into more realistic territory you're chasing diminishing returns pretty hard. The other big problem here is that you're talking about a complex skill but trying to reduce it to a single number. Tellingly, most of the 10x developer examples cited are cases where they know exactly what they want to do and have near-complete control over it, which isn't exactly how most developers work. It's really hard to quantify things like teamwork or the ability to distill what people need from what they say they need, and those are core skills for most of us in a way that optimizing a 3D engine is not. 1. I've done marathon length _hikes_ in far less than a single day, and I'm far from a hard-core athlete.
  - abenga 5y ago
    I think it is probably much, much less harder (as a young, healthy person) to get from relatively unfit to running a marathon in 4:20 compared to getting from that 4:20 to the 2:10 that the elite marathon runners do. It's probably a lot more than 10x harder to go from 4h to 2h, I think. I gained a lot of respect for them when I realized that my gym treadmills' maximum speed (20Kph, which I have never managed to hit for any significant length of time) is less than the average speed to hit the current world record times.
    - acdha 5y ago
      That was my experience as a cyclist, too — when I was in my 20s it was relatively straightforward to get my average for a 100mph ride with modest hills into the low 20mph range, while the people in the Tour de France are sustaining greater speeds over mountains. Going from that dedicated amateur level to even the lowest pro tiers requires both significantly more effort and a fair amount of luck in terms of genetics, being able to afford that time, etc.
- baron816 5y ago
  There’s a much bigger difference in ability going from a 2:30 marathon to a 2:00 marathon than going from a 3:00 to a 2:30 marathon. It’s not linear. But it’s also not relevant to the point the OP is making.
- ema 5y ago
  > The average person could cover the distance of a marathon, but it would take them many days of walking and resting. 26 miles at 3 miles an hour is a bit under 9 hours. Throw in another hour for resting and the average person should be able to walk a marathon in 10 hours. Sure they might be sore afterwards but from what I heard marathon runners also need to recover after their run.
LanceH 5y ago
A 10x marathoner can achieve a qualifying time for their marathon far 10x faster than the average person who might not ever be able to qualify. When you talk about a 10x programmer, you don't expect their program to run 10x as fast. You expect 10x the results. A 10x marathoner could post the regular marathoners best times 10x as frequently throughout the year easily. His training runs would destroy regular runners PR's. No amount of work by the regular guy would allow him to produce a single instance of comparable performance.
pjc50 5y ago
This is annoying semantics, but sport is just as often about being very fractionally better and making a time fractionally smaller .. at the expense of huge amounts of effort. The same can apply in software too. I don't think it invalidates the metaphor as long as you can stop people interpreting "10x" to mean "there is some precise metric on which we can determine the average is a number X and this person is at least 10X".

Consultant32452 5y ago

The average marathon run time is about 4.5 hours. The world record marathon run time is 2 hours. Most people who run cannot even complete a marathon. Then there are ultramarathons.

alfiedotwtf 5y ago
> Then there are ultramarathons and then there's Mauro Prosperi

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> Can a 10x marathon runner finish 26 miles in less than 1 hour? That’s the wrong analogy because marathon runners are already the 10x-ers of movement. The average person could cover the distance of a marathon, but it would take them many days of walking and resting. A marathon runner can finish a marathon in around 5 hours. That’s an order of magnitude faster than an average person, so yes, they are 10X-ers. Most people can walk, but few people can cover so much ground so quickly. That’s the essence of the 10X designator. The average programmer is not like the average marathon runner.

acdha 5y ago
I think your comment inadvertently illustrates how much of this comes down to how you define the baseline. I think the comparison for a world-leading marathon runner shouldn't be someone who _never_ exercises but someone who's actually put some effort into fitness (say, an amateur runner) — yes, they're faster but it's nowhere near 10x[1] — just as our baseline for a 10x developer shouldn't be someone who's never written a line of code before but the median professional developer. It's easy to get an order of magnitude win over someone who's completely inept but once you get into more realistic territory you're chasing diminishing returns pretty hard. The other big problem here is that you're talking about a complex skill but trying to reduce it to a single number. Tellingly, most of the 10x developer examples cited are cases where they know exactly what they want to do and have near-complete control over it, which isn't exactly how most developers work. It's really hard to quantify things like teamwork or the ability to distill what people need from what they say they need, and those are core skills for most of us in a way that optimizing a 3D engine is not. 1. I've done marathon length _hikes_ in far less than a single day, and I'm far from a hard-core athlete.
- abenga 5y ago
  I think it is probably much, much less harder (as a young, healthy person) to get from relatively unfit to running a marathon in 4:20 compared to getting from that 4:20 to the 2:10 that the elite marathon runners do. It's probably a lot more than 10x harder to go from 4h to 2h, I think. I gained a lot of respect for them when I realized that my gym treadmills' maximum speed (20Kph, which I have never managed to hit for any significant length of time) is less than the average speed to hit the current world record times.
  - acdha 5y ago
    That was my experience as a cyclist, too — when I was in my 20s it was relatively straightforward to get my average for a 100mph ride with modest hills into the low 20mph range, while the people in the Tour de France are sustaining greater speeds over mountains. Going from that dedicated amateur level to even the lowest pro tiers requires both significantly more effort and a fair amount of luck in terms of genetics, being able to afford that time, etc.
baron816 5y ago
There’s a much bigger difference in ability going from a 2:30 marathon to a 2:00 marathon than going from a 3:00 to a 2:30 marathon. It’s not linear. But it’s also not relevant to the point the OP is making.
ema 5y ago
> The average person could cover the distance of a marathon, but it would take them many days of walking and resting. 26 miles at 3 miles an hour is a bit under 9 hours. Throw in another hour for resting and the average person should be able to walk a marathon in 10 hours. Sure they might be sore afterwards but from what I heard marathon runners also need to recover after their run.

LanceH 5y ago

A 10x marathoner can achieve a qualifying time for their marathon far 10x faster than the average person who might not ever be able to qualify. When you talk about a 10x programmer, you don't expect their program to run 10x as fast. You expect 10x the results. A 10x marathoner could post the regular marathoners best times 10x as frequently throughout the year easily. His training runs would destroy regular runners PR's. No amount of work by the regular guy would allow him to produce a single instance of comparable performance.

pjc50 5y ago

This is annoying semantics, but sport is just as often about being very fractionally better and making a time fractionally smaller .. at the expense of huge amounts of effort. The same can apply in software too. I don't think it invalidates the metaphor as long as you can stop people interpreting "10x" to mean "there is some precise metric on which we can determine the average is a number X and this person is at least 10X".