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Comment by dghughes | Hacker News Reader

Our ancestors would jog for hours to chase down prey. The prey had to stop to pant to cool down which it couldn't do while running. I don't know how long it would have taken but at least a few hours seems like a reasonable assumption to wear down the animal prey. Although I don't think even our ancestors could jog for 239 hours straight.

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I don't recall the title, but I remember a documentary where an African tribe member would slow jog after an animal for about 24 hours before the animal would get exhausted, so a few hours seems on the lower end of the jogging requirements for our ancestors, but am happy to be proven wrong

Maybe they invented relay too.

This is the one that I remember watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoiE_o. Not exactly 24 hours though.

Humans can effectively run forever if it weren't for needing sleep, or eventually, needing to replace fat stores.

> Previous estimates, when accounting for glycogen depletion, suggest that a human could run at about a 10 minute per mile pace, which allows existing fat stores to be converted to glycogen, forever. The only limit to our eventual mileage, therefore, is our need for sleep. https://nikomccarty.medium.com/how-far-can-humans-run-d5c97f...

There are regularly 24 hour races and I've done a few myself. 100 miles in 24 hours isn't that hard. The record was just recently set at 192.25 miles (309.4 km):

https://www.runnersworld.com/news/a37465691/sania-sorokin-24...

There are also 48 hr and 7 day races. Sleep is necessary somewhere between those two points, though two guys just went 85 hours with basically no sleep:

https://www.bigsbackyardultra.com/

That's a race where every hour on the hour you have to complete 4.166 miles. You get as much rest as the balance of your time after you complete a lap till the next hour begins. Most competitors complete a lap in around 48-52 minutes. The race continues until there is only one runner left to complete a lap.

Then we have Cliff Young who ran 875 km in 5 days - at the age of 61.

https://www.farmprogress.com/blog/cliff-young-farmer-who-out...

There's Cliff Young's win in the 875km Westfield Sydney to Melbourne Ultramarathon.

> While the other competitors stopped to sleep for six hours, Young kept running. He ran continuously for five days, taking the lead during the first night and eventually winning by 10 hours

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Young_(athlete)

You might be thinking of this documentary: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0262452/

Reminds me of the man vs horse races (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon). Man rarely wins unless the weather is hot.

To be fair, though, horses are uniquely good at endurance compared to almost all other non-primate mammals. They have sweat glands all over their body just like humans do.

Also the times are relatively close.

what about dogs? They can cover nearly 1,000 miles of rough winter terrain in under 2 weeks, as seen in the iditarod. Or if we're looking at long distance travel in hot environments what about camels? I think this "humans can run down any animal with our endurance" stuff is vastly overblown. We're above average, but hardly the best on earth.

Dogs can't do endurance running in the heat like we can. Cooling is a limitation for most mammals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_running_hypothesis

Humans vs horses: https://slate.com/culture/2012/06/long-distance-running-and-...

Cheetahs, wolves : https://www.businessinsider.com/how-humans-evolved-to-be-bes...

We're really good at running.

Pretty interesting that all the counter-examples named so far are those that have been domesticated by humans

A human can run down any animal on earth because we're smart, not just because we have amazing endurance.

Animals don't realize that if they just ran 10 miles away they would escape easily. They'll just run far enough away that they can't really see us anymore. Then we find them and chase them again. Eventually they get tired because they sprint away and we conserve our energy.

A horse may be physically capable of running farther than a human, but actually getting them to do that is another thing.

The book Born to Run by Christopher McDougall should probably also be mentioned here. It has this theory as one of it's central premises.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6289283-born-to-run

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