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Comment by cujo | Hacker News Reader

> So one will get more from being persistent for years at marathon running than they would at the 100 yard dash

Need a source on this.

> So you can still be pretty good at marathon in your 50s, while you would be useless at the 100 yard dash or hitting home runs.

But not relative to your peers, which is what everyone compares to unless you're top 3 overall in any given race.

I have a gut feeling, the next fitness trend will be running faster vs running farther.

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Off the top of my head from exercise and physiology 101 - everyone without a mitochondria disorder and other disabilities simply gets better at endurance sports to the limit of their ability, resistance to injury at the particular sport and time invested - which can take years. The limit on ability for short term power to weight (sprinting) is much easier to reach because most people do not have that much sprint ability, there's a component that can be attributed to genetics for any ability but the human body is generally made for endurance sports and getting better at it (the adaptations such as increased blood plasma, better ability to utilize O2, increased mitochondrial density, increased capillary density, heart stroke volume, etc) and only some of us are cut out to really excel for sprinting events (there are some adaptations for sprint that work against endurance and vice versa ala muscle adaptation, also the main energy pathway for sprinting is anaerobic which can be trained but it's much quicker to find your personal limits at a particular sport ).

Peak sprint performance is in one's twenties, peak marathon performance is on one's thirties. Source: Usain Bolt and Elioud Kipchoge. You can find tons of finish times with age for running events online to show how the degradation in performance falls slowly with age for marathon times. It's actually hard to find information on sprint times for older competitors because the participation rate is much lower. There is a significant body of research that indicates humans have significant advantages for endurance performance versus other mammals. Born to Run is the classic popular book about the subject and has references to the primary sources.

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