11 ms·

Running Speeds

308 points by alexmolas 3y ago

croes 3y ago
Nitpicking: to truly compare the running times they should use the same shoes and tracks. There is a lot of effort put in to make athletes faster. I doubt Usain Bolt would be under 20s on a dirt track.
- alexmolas 3y ago
  I guess this can be incorporated as one of the multiplicative factors that determine the overall speed of a runner.
- onetimeuse92304 3y ago
  As an avid runner (10 miles every day, over 3k miles last year), shoes and tracks mean less than you think. Yes, the small fractions of a percent are meaningful but only to people who compare their results against each other to find out who is faster. To compare my result against a professional runner, they are running close to twice as fast as me and that less than 1% difference is completely meaningless.
  - jmye 3y ago
    Yup. People badly overestimate the shoe effect, especially.
    - onetimeuse92304 3y ago
      The shoes are the worst thing. Yes, they do work. But it does not make any sense for anybody except people who race for top positions. 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.
      - jmye 3y ago
        I will say, in defense, that the foam and some of the carbon plates, do substantially help with recovery. I use an older pair of VaporFlys for that reason - my feet and calves feel much better the day after a big race. 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.
        onetimeuse92304 3y ago
        You can buy good recovery shoes/slippers for small fraction of the price though...
        mikestew 3y ago
        I’m sure those make for horrible race shoes. I think you missed parent’s point.
  - iamacyborg 3y ago
    > As an avid runner (10 miles every day, over 3k miles last year), shoes and tracks mean less than you think. 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.
    - morepork 3y ago
      A 14 second difference is less than 2% of the total time though, so it doesn't entirely disagree with them. Between dirt in casual running shoes to a track and top tech shoes, there would I guess be about a 15-20% difference, and most of that would be the surface. I would speculate more for a sprint as traction/acceleration is more critical.
      - iamacyborg 3y ago
        Right, track surface is a big differentiator, let alone shorter indoor 200m tracks. 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.
        morepork 3y ago
        For sprints in particular, the spikes make a decent difference on the track, more so for elite athletes as they need the extra traction more
        iamacyborg 3y ago
        Yep, but for longer distances the track has a better energy return than running on the road.
- cesnja 3y ago
  There were 20000-year old footprints discovered in Australia [1], the estimated speed of these barefoot runners was comparable to olympic sprinters. [1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/20-000-year-old-human-footprints-found-in-australia https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/20-000-ye...
  - yread 3y ago
    It could be that those people were just better at running than us. Tech that makes shoes and track more springy makes things measurably faster
  - mkl 3y ago
    Subsequent work has revised that estimate downwards quite a bit: https://www.originalwisdom.com/wp-content/uploads/bsk-pdf-manager/2019/03/Ruiz-and-Torices_2013_Humans-running-at-stadiums-and-beaches-and-the-accuracy-of-speed-estimation-from-fossil-trackways.pdf https://www.originalwisdom.com/wp-content/uploads/bsk-pdf-ma...
- otteromkram 3y ago
  Records would never get broken, then. 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.
wjnc 3y ago
If your high school math would only consist of working through the various books of Allen Downey you would get a very rigorous, basic introduction to: programming, computer science, statistics, computational and Bayesian thinking and a lot more. You could write and compare simple to intermediate programs in many programming languages, where you’d have experience in implementing the same structures in different languages. Distributions and sampling wouldn’t scare you. It would beat high school math (at least mine in the 90s) by a million miles. Did I mention I think Allen is totally great yet?
- tgv 3y ago
  This article is bollocks, though. It's a fit of highly unrepresentative data, not even a good one, but worse: it doesn't explain anything. If you take that model seriously, Usain Bolt could have been anybody in the entire history of mankind.
  - wjnc 3y ago
    There’s two types of people in the world: those that build models and those that complain about the models than have been built. 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.
  - dilawar 3y ago
    "All models are wrong, some are useful." Heard it so many times during my Ph.D.
  - codeflo 3y ago
    > If you take that model seriously, Usain Bolt could have been anybody in the entire history of mankind. No model is perfect, but I don’t have the slightest clue why you think that would follow.
    - 3y ago
leto_ii 3y ago
I'm not sure this analysis is as surprising or meaningful as it might seem at first sight. 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.
- vjk800 3y ago
  I think the point is that all these traits are multiplicative, not summative. Your maximum running speed at the age of 40 is maybe 0.8 times what it was when you were 20, not your running speed at the age of 20 minus some. And when you have several multiplicative traits like age, gender, training history, all different aspects of genetics, etc., you get a lognormal distribution instead of a normal distribution, and with it a much larger variance between individuals.
- alexmolas 3y ago
  If I'm not wrong you can't obtain a lognormal as a mixture of Gaussian distributions. The processes that generate these distributions are completely different. Gaussian distribution arise when the factors are additive, and lognormal when factors are multiplicative, so these are two completely different distributions. The same way I don't think you can get a normal distribution just by conditioning on an exponential distribution.
  - jefftk 3y ago
    Say you get a lognormal by combining five gaussian-distributed factors (as in the past). Then you condition on four of those factors. The remaining factor, and hence your overall result, will be gaussian. 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.
    - 3y ago
PaulKeeble 3y ago
I used to like watching the Special forces selection process TV shows. They would claim that mostly people failed due to mental fortitude. The problem was repeatedly in these shows you would see people who weren't fit enough, whose muscles were not capable of the physical strength and stamina necessary to push like this. Many had trained very hard and were in very good shape but they just couldn't sustain it in the cold. These peoples bodies broke down too fast. Mental fortitude only seemed to come into it when you got down to the final few, 90% of people their bodies failed before they got to the point where mental fortitude mattered. 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.
- onetimeuse92304 3y ago
  Yes, the mental fortitude is much overblown aspect. 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.)
quickthrower2 3y ago
See also: unicorn startups 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!
- eternauta3k 3y ago
  IIRC Nassim Taleb would say that that's exactly the kind of outlier which is not modeled correctly by the standard Gaussian models.
underdeserver 3y ago
Before I was injured, I used to run 8 km (about 5 miles), three times a week. I maintained about 5:30 minutes/km, and I would sprint the last 200 or so meters at the end. 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.
- ramraj07 3y ago
  I was once biking at what I considered acceptable pace on a long empty road in Texas one fine Sunday. Slowly I approached a kid like maybe 15-16, running. While biking without exerting myself, I was only able to approach him slowly. He was shirtless so you could se he was toned and perfectly executing every step as if it’s a prerecorded NPC. A body perfectly tuned to do that one operation, with hours going to that preparation every day of their life. Why would anyone be surprised they do so much better?
  - KeplerBoy 3y ago
    You probably weren't cycling that fast tbh. No human is capable of running much faster than 20 km/h for extended periods of time. The average speed of the WR for a 10k is at 23 km/h. 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.
- Phenomenit 3y ago
  Did you get injured because you sprinted in the end when your legs were worn down? I’m just asking because that happened to me a few times before I put two and two together.
  - underdeserver 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
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MagicMoonlight 3y ago
Imagine being a little gazelle and seeing one of the standing creatures start running at you. They just don’t stop. It’s like it’s not even running to them.
gadders 3y ago
I think people don't realise how large differences in ability can be. 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.
snickerbockers 3y ago
Why not just take the "metal gear solid" approach to shoplifting instead of trying to outrun the professional athlete?
- ReactiveJelly 3y ago
  I don't fit in a shoebox like I used to.
- eloisant 3y ago
  Because in the first case you're breaking the law, and in the second you're just participating in the shop's event?
  - snickerbockers 3y ago
    but according to TFA the shop gives permission to steal?
    - snowwrestler 3y ago
      > Recently a shoe store in France ran a promotion called “Rob It to Get It” It was a promotion with a funny name, essentially a race. Not permission to actually steal by any means.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
lordnacho 3y ago
I've often wondered how exactly I might increase my sprint speed, in terms of form. I've never met a sprint trainer, so all I can do is just try to naturally sprint, but I'm clearly not very fast and never was. But somehow I don't even know what the fundamentals are. What do you need to do to be fast? 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.
- oweiler 3y ago
  There are tons of tutorials on YT about proper running form.
  - Phenomenit 3y ago
    Can you recommend any particular video that you enjoy or is helpful?
    - jbochi 3y ago
      I like this one: https://youtu.be/OIXVDdH3o6g?si=5zmNifE_Zzm4Rasb https://youtu.be/OIXVDdH3o6g?si=5zmNifE_Zzm4Rasb
- koblas 3y ago
  Best advice -- find a local running club that does track workouts. The group dynamics will be incredibly helpful as a baseline. Sprinting is big on strength low on endurance, that's why you see muscular sprinters and lean 5k+ runners. 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.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- glenngillen 3y ago
md_ 3y ago
The really obvious thing, if you watch the Freeze "best of" clip, is that most people have terrible running form. In most cases, I suspect I could tell who has a chance and who doesn't simply by looking at one stride from each competitor. 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."
- teddyh 3y ago
  You can see the difference: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3ZpCjEn_lc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3ZpCjEn_lc>
- queuebert 3y ago
  Makes me think of Tom Cruise running: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09MiWO8uDfc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09MiWO8uDfc
- anthomtb 3y ago
  In the Freeze video clip from TFA, the guy he's racing looks over his shoulder towards the end too. Its pretty hard to run forward with any velocity when looking backwards. That maneuver alone probably cost him a second, maybe more.
nlh 3y ago
I have what may be a silly (or even ridiculous) question: 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.
- darkerside 3y ago
  Why did you care about your distance? What's so special about going farther and farther every time until you hit some arbitrary goal like 26.2 miles? Beating your last time is fine and rewarding, and you can choose your next goal to be whatever you want.
  - brailsafe 3y ago
    This was my thought too. It's just a matter of picking an arbitrary metric and shooting for it, given constraints that probably don't matter. 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.
  - 3y ago
jacobevelyn 3y ago
Semi-related: years ago I made a silly little running pace converter site: https://pace.ninja/ https://pace.ninja/ 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?”
patrick0d 3y ago
>height and weight, fast- and slow-twitch muscle mass, cardiovascular conditioning, flexibility and elasticity, and probably more. 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.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  That seems, at least to me, a pretty egalitarian and optimistic view. I mean, the teenager is basically as good as the Olympian in your example, qualitatively. If the peak of skill is only 10% higher than a talented amateur with some training, we should probably have a more equal income distribution.
  - thfuran 3y ago
    For one, it isn't. Also, most people aren't paid to run.
- michaelt 3y ago
  > a good teenager might run a time of 10.70 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.
LRVNHQ 3y ago
I don't know what point this article is trying to make, but I guess the author doesn't know much about running since he conflates sprinting and long distance running. Long distance running is an endurance sport, sprinting is more aking to a very specific application of power/strength training. The stride isn't event the same. Before doing any kind of data analysis, it's worth considering if your datapoints are even refering to the same thing.
gboyegaebenezer 3y ago
[flagged]
low_tech_love 3y ago
I’m not a fit person but when I see someone running like that (the Freeze in the video) it just looks so beautiful to me. Seeing a human body functioning at such a high performance, thinking about how many hours and how much effort that guy went through to get to where he is, I just feel like tapping him on the back and saying “great job dude”. It’s a bit like when I see some great feat of engineering, like a big bridge or a massive building or a nuclear reactor or something like that. It just makes me wonder how awesome and amazing humanity is. 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.
- aziaziazi 3y ago
  > I get so annoyed when I hear people say things like “I like dogs more than humans.” 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.
  - low_tech_love 3y ago
    I love dogs; the “one or the other” attitude comes from them, not me. The comparison is absurd in my opinion. 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.
    - aziaziazi 3y ago
      I agree the comparaison is absurd in the literal reading. Comparaisons are also used as a language feature, like in “I really love chocolate more than anything else”. Don’t underestimate fellows perspective based on the view they’re expressing at the moment.
sieste 3y ago
> Here’s why I think speed depends on a product rather than a sum of factors. If all of your factors are good, you are fast; if any of them are bad, you are slow. Mathematically, the operation that has this property is multiplication. Nice explanation of the difference between additive and multiplicative.
bwanab 3y ago
I'm probably overthinking this, but the article makes me think about the infamous 10x programmer. If, as seems reasonable, the ability to program successfully depends on a number of factors (raw brain power, spacial reasoning, education, ability to concentrate for long periods, etc) and these factors follow a similar gaussian distribution, then 10x doesn't really seem that out of line for the best vs average programmers.
- ip26 3y ago
  That is pretty much the original argument for the 10x programmer, a lot of 1.1x factors compounding.
raydev 3y ago
My take is that the author is focusing too much on "all factors", and the reason for the distribution is that the people who 1) realize they are "good" and 2) want to improve, end up putting in more training time to get even better, which leads to a natural gap in measured ability. 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.
- ellyagg 3y ago
  Ah, great hypothesis.
- DiscourseFan 3y ago
  You could just measure the running speed of every hunter in a bush tribe--there is a group of people who are in very good shape and run all the time.
- stefs 3y ago
  i think the "all factors" comes into play at a higher level than the consistency factor. you need the consistency to become _really good_ and with consistency you could probably become _rather good_ (lacking any blockers), but to become the very best in a competitive environment you need "all factors" to line up after consistency has already been applied. "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.
js2 3y ago
Even elite marathon pace is a sprint for folks who can do it at all: https://youtu.be/SRYtn0j5ccA?si=PhWcNKTxF9I0XHjC https://youtu.be/SRYtn0j5ccA?si=PhWcNKTxF9I0XHjC

308 points by alexmolas 3y ago

Nitpicking: to truly compare the running times they should use the same shoes and tracks. There is a lot of effort put in to make athletes faster. I doubt Usain Bolt would be under 20s on a dirt track.

alexmolas 3y ago
I guess this can be incorporated as one of the multiplicative factors that determine the overall speed of a runner.
onetimeuse92304 3y ago
As an avid runner (10 miles every day, over 3k miles last year), shoes and tracks mean less than you think. Yes, the small fractions of a percent are meaningful but only to people who compare their results against each other to find out who is faster. To compare my result against a professional runner, they are running close to twice as fast as me and that less than 1% difference is completely meaningless.
- jmye 3y ago
  Yup. People badly overestimate the shoe effect, especially.
  - onetimeuse92304 3y ago
    The shoes are the worst thing. Yes, they do work. But it does not make any sense for anybody except people who race for top positions. 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.
    - jmye 3y ago
      I will say, in defense, that the foam and some of the carbon plates, do substantially help with recovery. I use an older pair of VaporFlys for that reason - my feet and calves feel much better the day after a big race. 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.
      - onetimeuse92304 3y ago
        You can buy good recovery shoes/slippers for small fraction of the price though...
        mikestew 3y ago
        I’m sure those make for horrible race shoes. I think you missed parent’s point.
- iamacyborg 3y ago
  > As an avid runner (10 miles every day, over 3k miles last year), shoes and tracks mean less than you think. 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.
  - morepork 3y ago
    A 14 second difference is less than 2% of the total time though, so it doesn't entirely disagree with them. Between dirt in casual running shoes to a track and top tech shoes, there would I guess be about a 15-20% difference, and most of that would be the surface. I would speculate more for a sprint as traction/acceleration is more critical.
    - iamacyborg 3y ago
      Right, track surface is a big differentiator, let alone shorter indoor 200m tracks. 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.
      - morepork 3y ago
        For sprints in particular, the spikes make a decent difference on the track, more so for elite athletes as they need the extra traction more
        iamacyborg 3y ago
        Yep, but for longer distances the track has a better energy return than running on the road.
cesnja 3y ago
There were 20000-year old footprints discovered in Australia [1], the estimated speed of these barefoot runners was comparable to olympic sprinters. [1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/20-000-year-old-human-footprints-found-in-australia https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/20-000-ye...
- yread 3y ago
  It could be that those people were just better at running than us. Tech that makes shoes and track more springy makes things measurably faster
- mkl 3y ago
  Subsequent work has revised that estimate downwards quite a bit: https://www.originalwisdom.com/wp-content/uploads/bsk-pdf-manager/2019/03/Ruiz-and-Torices_2013_Humans-running-at-stadiums-and-beaches-and-the-accuracy-of-speed-estimation-from-fossil-trackways.pdf https://www.originalwisdom.com/wp-content/uploads/bsk-pdf-ma...
otteromkram 3y ago
Records would never get broken, then. 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.

wjnc 3y ago

If your high school math would only consist of working through the various books of Allen Downey you would get a very rigorous, basic introduction to: programming, computer science, statistics, computational and Bayesian thinking and a lot more. You could write and compare simple to intermediate programs in many programming languages, where you’d have experience in implementing the same structures in different languages. Distributions and sampling wouldn’t scare you. It would beat high school math (at least mine in the 90s) by a million miles. Did I mention I think Allen is totally great yet?

tgv 3y ago
This article is bollocks, though. It's a fit of highly unrepresentative data, not even a good one, but worse: it doesn't explain anything. If you take that model seriously, Usain Bolt could have been anybody in the entire history of mankind.
- wjnc 3y ago
  There’s two types of people in the world: those that build models and those that complain about the models than have been built. 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.
- dilawar 3y ago
  "All models are wrong, some are useful." Heard it so many times during my Ph.D.
- codeflo 3y ago
  > If you take that model seriously, Usain Bolt could have been anybody in the entire history of mankind. No model is perfect, but I don’t have the slightest clue why you think that would follow.
  - 3y ago

leto_ii 3y ago

I'm not sure this analysis is as surprising or meaningful as it might seem at first sight. 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.

vjk800 3y ago
I think the point is that all these traits are multiplicative, not summative. Your maximum running speed at the age of 40 is maybe 0.8 times what it was when you were 20, not your running speed at the age of 20 minus some. And when you have several multiplicative traits like age, gender, training history, all different aspects of genetics, etc., you get a lognormal distribution instead of a normal distribution, and with it a much larger variance between individuals.
alexmolas 3y ago
If I'm not wrong you can't obtain a lognormal as a mixture of Gaussian distributions. The processes that generate these distributions are completely different. Gaussian distribution arise when the factors are additive, and lognormal when factors are multiplicative, so these are two completely different distributions. The same way I don't think you can get a normal distribution just by conditioning on an exponential distribution.
- jefftk 3y ago
  Say you get a lognormal by combining five gaussian-distributed factors (as in the past). Then you condition on four of those factors. The remaining factor, and hence your overall result, will be gaussian. 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.
  - 3y ago

PaulKeeble 3y ago

I used to like watching the Special forces selection process TV shows. They would claim that mostly people failed due to mental fortitude. The problem was repeatedly in these shows you would see people who weren't fit enough, whose muscles were not capable of the physical strength and stamina necessary to push like this. Many had trained very hard and were in very good shape but they just couldn't sustain it in the cold. These peoples bodies broke down too fast. Mental fortitude only seemed to come into it when you got down to the final few, 90% of people their bodies failed before they got to the point where mental fortitude mattered. 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.

onetimeuse92304 3y ago
Yes, the mental fortitude is much overblown aspect. 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.)

quickthrower2 3y ago

See also: unicorn startups 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!

eternauta3k 3y ago
IIRC Nassim Taleb would say that that's exactly the kind of outlier which is not modeled correctly by the standard Gaussian models.

underdeserver 3y ago

Before I was injured, I used to run 8 km (about 5 miles), three times a week. I maintained about 5:30 minutes/km, and I would sprint the last 200 or so meters at the end. 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.

ramraj07 3y ago
I was once biking at what I considered acceptable pace on a long empty road in Texas one fine Sunday. Slowly I approached a kid like maybe 15-16, running. While biking without exerting myself, I was only able to approach him slowly. He was shirtless so you could se he was toned and perfectly executing every step as if it’s a prerecorded NPC. A body perfectly tuned to do that one operation, with hours going to that preparation every day of their life. Why would anyone be surprised they do so much better?
- KeplerBoy 3y ago
  You probably weren't cycling that fast tbh. No human is capable of running much faster than 20 km/h for extended periods of time. The average speed of the WR for a 10k is at 23 km/h. 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.
Phenomenit 3y ago
Did you get injured because you sprinted in the end when your legs were worn down? I’m just asking because that happened to me a few times before I put two and two together.
- underdeserver 3y ago

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MagicMoonlight 3y ago

Imagine being a little gazelle and seeing one of the standing creatures start running at you. They just don’t stop. It’s like it’s not even running to them.

gadders 3y ago

I think people don't realise how large differences in ability can be. 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.

snickerbockers 3y ago

Why not just take the "metal gear solid" approach to shoplifting instead of trying to outrun the professional athlete?

ReactiveJelly 3y ago
I don't fit in a shoebox like I used to.
eloisant 3y ago
Because in the first case you're breaking the law, and in the second you're just participating in the shop's event?
- snickerbockers 3y ago
  but according to TFA the shop gives permission to steal?
  - snowwrestler 3y ago
    > Recently a shoe store in France ran a promotion called “Rob It to Get It” It was a promotion with a funny name, essentially a race. Not permission to actually steal by any means.
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lordnacho 3y ago

I've often wondered how exactly I might increase my sprint speed, in terms of form. I've never met a sprint trainer, so all I can do is just try to naturally sprint, but I'm clearly not very fast and never was. But somehow I don't even know what the fundamentals are. What do you need to do to be fast? 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.

oweiler 3y ago
There are tons of tutorials on YT about proper running form.
- Phenomenit 3y ago
  Can you recommend any particular video that you enjoy or is helpful?
  - jbochi 3y ago
    I like this one: https://youtu.be/OIXVDdH3o6g?si=5zmNifE_Zzm4Rasb https://youtu.be/OIXVDdH3o6g?si=5zmNifE_Zzm4Rasb
koblas 3y ago
Best advice -- find a local running club that does track workouts. The group dynamics will be incredibly helpful as a baseline. Sprinting is big on strength low on endurance, that's why you see muscular sprinters and lean 5k+ runners. 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.
- deleted 3y ago
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glenngillen 3y ago

md_ 3y ago

The really obvious thing, if you watch the Freeze "best of" clip, is that most people have terrible running form. In most cases, I suspect I could tell who has a chance and who doesn't simply by looking at one stride from each competitor. 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."

teddyh 3y ago
You can see the difference: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3ZpCjEn_lc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3ZpCjEn_lc>
queuebert 3y ago
Makes me think of Tom Cruise running: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09MiWO8uDfc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09MiWO8uDfc
anthomtb 3y ago
In the Freeze video clip from TFA, the guy he's racing looks over his shoulder towards the end too. Its pretty hard to run forward with any velocity when looking backwards. That maneuver alone probably cost him a second, maybe more.

nlh 3y ago

I have what may be a silly (or even ridiculous) question: 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.

darkerside 3y ago
Why did you care about your distance? What's so special about going farther and farther every time until you hit some arbitrary goal like 26.2 miles? Beating your last time is fine and rewarding, and you can choose your next goal to be whatever you want.
- brailsafe 3y ago
  This was my thought too. It's just a matter of picking an arbitrary metric and shooting for it, given constraints that probably don't matter. 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.
- 3y ago

jacobevelyn 3y ago

Semi-related: years ago I made a silly little running pace converter site: https://pace.ninja/ https://pace.ninja/ 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?”

patrick0d 3y ago

>height and weight, fast- and slow-twitch muscle mass, cardiovascular conditioning, flexibility and elasticity, and probably more. 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.

bee_rider 3y ago
That seems, at least to me, a pretty egalitarian and optimistic view. I mean, the teenager is basically as good as the Olympian in your example, qualitatively. If the peak of skill is only 10% higher than a talented amateur with some training, we should probably have a more equal income distribution.
- thfuran 3y ago
  For one, it isn't. Also, most people aren't paid to run.
michaelt 3y ago
> a good teenager might run a time of 10.70 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.

LRVNHQ 3y ago

I don't know what point this article is trying to make, but I guess the author doesn't know much about running since he conflates sprinting and long distance running. Long distance running is an endurance sport, sprinting is more aking to a very specific application of power/strength training. The stride isn't event the same. Before doing any kind of data analysis, it's worth considering if your datapoints are even refering to the same thing.

gboyegaebenezer 3y ago

[flagged]

low_tech_love 3y ago

I’m not a fit person but when I see someone running like that (the Freeze in the video) it just looks so beautiful to me. Seeing a human body functioning at such a high performance, thinking about how many hours and how much effort that guy went through to get to where he is, I just feel like tapping him on the back and saying “great job dude”. It’s a bit like when I see some great feat of engineering, like a big bridge or a massive building or a nuclear reactor or something like that. It just makes me wonder how awesome and amazing humanity is. 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.

aziaziazi 3y ago
> I get so annoyed when I hear people say things like “I like dogs more than humans.” 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.
- low_tech_love 3y ago
  I love dogs; the “one or the other” attitude comes from them, not me. The comparison is absurd in my opinion. 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.
  - aziaziazi 3y ago
    I agree the comparaison is absurd in the literal reading. Comparaisons are also used as a language feature, like in “I really love chocolate more than anything else”. Don’t underestimate fellows perspective based on the view they’re expressing at the moment.

sieste 3y ago

> Here’s why I think speed depends on a product rather than a sum of factors. If all of your factors are good, you are fast; if any of them are bad, you are slow. Mathematically, the operation that has this property is multiplication. Nice explanation of the difference between additive and multiplicative.

bwanab 3y ago

I'm probably overthinking this, but the article makes me think about the infamous 10x programmer. If, as seems reasonable, the ability to program successfully depends on a number of factors (raw brain power, spacial reasoning, education, ability to concentrate for long periods, etc) and these factors follow a similar gaussian distribution, then 10x doesn't really seem that out of line for the best vs average programmers.

ip26 3y ago
That is pretty much the original argument for the 10x programmer, a lot of 1.1x factors compounding.

raydev 3y ago

My take is that the author is focusing too much on "all factors", and the reason for the distribution is that the people who 1) realize they are "good" and 2) want to improve, end up putting in more training time to get even better, which leads to a natural gap in measured ability. 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.

ellyagg 3y ago
Ah, great hypothesis.
DiscourseFan 3y ago
You could just measure the running speed of every hunter in a bush tribe--there is a group of people who are in very good shape and run all the time.
stefs 3y ago
i think the "all factors" comes into play at a higher level than the consistency factor. you need the consistency to become _really good_ and with consistency you could probably become _rather good_ (lacking any blockers), but to become the very best in a competitive environment you need "all factors" to line up after consistency has already been applied. "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.

js2 3y ago

Even elite marathon pace is a sprint for folks who can do it at all: https://youtu.be/SRYtn0j5ccA?si=PhWcNKTxF9I0XHjC https://youtu.be/SRYtn0j5ccA?si=PhWcNKTxF9I0XHjC