3 ms·

Wow, seems surprisingly balanced. I would guess that if it was 50% longer distance than humans would win reliably, and 50% shorter would allow the horses to win

Wow, seems surprisingly balanced. I would guess that if it was 50% longer distance than humans would win reliably, and 50% shorter would allow the horses to win?

notahacker 5mo ago
Think it's more to do with hilly, wooded courses unfavourable to horses and a requirement that the horse's heart rate remain below a certain threshold when inspected by a vet in the middle and end of a course, whereas the leading humans are maxing out their efforts I don't think the Mongol cavalry would lose races to humans over any distance of steppe
- neaden 5mo ago
  Yeah I think on say, a proper road the horse would win at any distance.
  - twosdai 5mo ago
    There's probably some upper limit to it, i am not sure a horse could live through the ultra marathon moab race in the western us.
  - 8note 5mo ago
    the road adds some infrastructure - i think at that point the person should get a bike?
    - shagie 5mo ago
      1990: For a few joyous years there was the Man v Horse v Bike competition in Mid-Wales - https://youtu.be/vFlglZUIKO8 https://youtu.be/vFlglZUIKO8
      - donkey_brains 5mo ago
        Well that’s just not fair. Even the fastest human on earth can’t be expected to keep up with a horse riding a bike.
- AngryData 5mo ago
  To be fair you can run a horse to death in a race, a human however isn't likely to die from running a race even to their physical limits.
shagie 5mo ago
The weather conditions also impact it significantly. https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/humans-vs-horses-racing-heat-study/ https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/hu... > Lobb’s victory came on a hot day, as did Florian Holzinger’s subsequent victory in 2007—a significant detail, according to a new study in the journal Experimental Physiology from Lewis Halsey of the University of Roehampton in Britain and Caleb Bryce of the Botswana Predator Conservation Trust. Halsey and Bryce gathered historical data from three endurance races that pit humans against horses, including the Man Versus Horse Marathon, to test the idea that humans are uniquely adapted to run for long distances in hot weather. > This idea has been around since the 1980s, and it gained prominence when Harvard anthropologist Daniel Lieberman and University of Utah biologist Dennis Bramble published a 2004 Nature paper hypothesizing that running had “substantially shaped human evolution.” They argued that our ability to keep running at a moderate pace even on hot days allowed us to run prey like kudu to exhaustion or outcompete other animals in the race to scavenge carcasses left by other large predators. There's a plot with the analysis of the Old Dominion with weather stations in there that show a steeper negative slope for horses compared to the humans. > Overall, for every increase of 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), the horses slowed down by about 1 percent—or 0.07 miles per hour, to be precise. The humans, on the other hand, slowed down by just 0.04 miles per hour for each extra degree of heat. That 36 percent advantage for the humans was statistically significant. --- For the Man vs Horse, the weather conditions ("Hot", "Rain/sun/windy" - not exact values)... the entry for 2022 was the human winning by 1:51 on a warm day, and 2023 was a human wining by 9:44 on a sweltering day.

Wow, seems surprisingly balanced. I would guess that if it was 50% longer distance than humans would win reliably, and 50% shorter would allow the horses to win?

notahacker 5mo ago

Think it's more to do with hilly, wooded courses unfavourable to horses and a requirement that the horse's heart rate remain below a certain threshold when inspected by a vet in the middle and end of a course, whereas the leading humans are maxing out their efforts I don't think the Mongol cavalry would lose races to humans over any distance of steppe

neaden 5mo ago
Yeah I think on say, a proper road the horse would win at any distance.
- twosdai 5mo ago
  There's probably some upper limit to it, i am not sure a horse could live through the ultra marathon moab race in the western us.
- 8note 5mo ago
  the road adds some infrastructure - i think at that point the person should get a bike?
  - shagie 5mo ago
    1990: For a few joyous years there was the Man v Horse v Bike competition in Mid-Wales - https://youtu.be/vFlglZUIKO8 https://youtu.be/vFlglZUIKO8
    - donkey_brains 5mo ago
      Well that’s just not fair. Even the fastest human on earth can’t be expected to keep up with a horse riding a bike.
AngryData 5mo ago
To be fair you can run a horse to death in a race, a human however isn't likely to die from running a race even to their physical limits.

shagie 5mo ago

The weather conditions also impact it significantly. https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/humans-vs-horses-racing-heat-study/ https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/hu... > Lobb’s victory came on a hot day, as did Florian Holzinger’s subsequent victory in 2007—a significant detail, according to a new study in the journal Experimental Physiology from Lewis Halsey of the University of Roehampton in Britain and Caleb Bryce of the Botswana Predator Conservation Trust. Halsey and Bryce gathered historical data from three endurance races that pit humans against horses, including the Man Versus Horse Marathon, to test the idea that humans are uniquely adapted to run for long distances in hot weather. > This idea has been around since the 1980s, and it gained prominence when Harvard anthropologist Daniel Lieberman and University of Utah biologist Dennis Bramble published a 2004 Nature paper hypothesizing that running had “substantially shaped human evolution.” They argued that our ability to keep running at a moderate pace even on hot days allowed us to run prey like kudu to exhaustion or outcompete other animals in the race to scavenge carcasses left by other large predators. There's a plot with the analysis of the Old Dominion with weather stations in there that show a steeper negative slope for horses compared to the humans. > Overall, for every increase of 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), the horses slowed down by about 1 percent—or 0.07 miles per hour, to be precise. The humans, on the other hand, slowed down by just 0.04 miles per hour for each extra degree of heat. That 36 percent advantage for the humans was statistically significant. --- For the Man vs Horse, the weather conditions ("Hot", "Rain/sun/windy" - not exact values)... the entry for 2022 was the human winning by 1:51 on a warm day, and 2023 was a human wining by 9:44 on a sweltering day.