Limits to running speed in dogs, horses and human | Hacker News Reader

Limits to running speed in dogs, horses and human

journals.biologists.com

67 pointsfforflo62 comments

The to-me coolest bit is at the very bottom, captioned "context":

> [...] a women running the estimated absolute fastest speed for 100 m would have beaten the world's fastest male in 1955, a feat that would have astounded contemporary spectators. The predicted maximum speed (5.83 m s–1) for a man running a marathon (42.2 km) would have been fast enough to beat the great Emil Zatopek in his world's best 10 km race in 1954. Those in the stands watching that race could not have imagined someone besting Zatopek by 16 s, and then simply continuing at that winning pace for another 32.2 km.

The actual result for humans is split out by distance and gender in figure 11 near the bottom, peaking at ~150m distance just shy of 11 for men and 10 m/s for women

I wonder if we have better/faster athletes now because poverty is going down? Like, back in the 1950's there were people on this earth who were genetically the best at running but potentially did not have the economic means to actually train themselves and develop. As we bring more people above the poverty line, there's more of a chance of finding those genetically gifted people and developing them.

The technology related to running also improved a lot in the last years (running shoes with carbon inserts, better nutrition, ...)

I’d conjecture that what we see with both humans and animals is a result of two primary factors: nutrition and global mobility. Better food and medicine combined with mobility so that the best of the best can be brought to the competition.

There are dozens factors that explains the performance improvements, like tech that can help detect future talents, globalization that can help finding talents in the middle of nowhere, studies on physiology... The biggest one being probably : experience. Thousands of athletes and coaches have learn for other's success and failures regarding training, pacing, resting, nutrition and removal of psychological limitations. Roger Bannister history is relevant : before he broke the 4mn mile, people thought it was impossible for decades. Once he did, many other achieved the same feat in the following years.

Regarding your question about poverty, I'd say it's a tough one.

Because in third World countries, only the athletes that pass the selection process actually come out of poverty. The others stay there.

In rich countries on the other hand, I see two things :

- having the means to train with the best coaches, the best gear... can help you make it to the top ; some rich parents are even pushing hard this way (see the article on tennis a few weeks back here en HN)

- but also, if you have the means to go to college, aiming for a regular career is a way much safer bet than pursuing a professional athlete career. Teenagers that are very good at a sport and are given the choice between the two, most are going to pick the regular career and enjoy sport outside of work. A poor kid who's choice is between a life changing career in sports and stay in the misery they known since their birth, are definitely going to pick the only one offering the hope of a positive outcome.

I would imagine that as global population increases, we just get to buy more and more lottery tickets with the hope of producing someone with the genes, the temperament, and the upbringing to excel in any given niche in increasingly absurd ways.

There are a lot of factors, however for better or worse PEDs are likely a huge portion of this. I don't think folks realize just how pervasive their use is in almost every sport.

“PED” isn’t a precise term. I think most sports, at top level, are kind of clean in that athletes adhere to doping regulations.

They also sail extremely close to the limits, though. For example, exercise induced asthma is extremely common for athletes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise-induced_bronchoconstr...:

“Research by sports scientist John Dickinson found that 70 percent of UK-based members of the British swimming team had some form of asthma, as did a third of Team Sky cyclists, compared to a national asthma rate of eight to ten percent, whilst a study by the United States Olympic Committee in 2000 found that half of cross-country skiers had EIB.”

Many of those athletes will use medicine to correct for this that enhances their performance. That isn’t that different from taking corticosteroids to cure an inflammation that thus allow athletes to train at higher intensity, but the former is medicine and the latter is forbidden medicine aka doping.

> taking corticosteroids to cure an inflammation that thus allow athletes to train at higher intensity, but the former is medicine and the latter is forbidden medicine aka doping.

Is that a UK-specific sporting regulation? In the US, professional athletes regularly take cortisone shots with no repurcussions.

That varies by the league. USADA/WADA rules are fairly strict about corticosteroids but some US professional sports have looser rules.

I believe that the popular working theory is that poor people have less options, i.e. distractions, which leads to more time spent training and better athletes. If the theory is correct then bringing people out of poverty would also decrease the number of candidates.

> I believe that the popular working theory is that poor people have less options, i.e. distractions, which leads to more time spent training and better athletes

That sounds backwards. Poor people have more distractions, they need to think about how to survive the current week/month with the little they have, and do everything they can do make sure to afford housing and food, leading to less time spent training.

At least that's my personal experience of being poor and not being able to focus because I didn't know if I'd afford the rent the next month.

> I believe that the popular working theory is that poor people have less options, i.e. distractions, which leads to more time spent training and better athletes.

As someone who grew up poor - this doesn’t make any sense. When you’re poor you can’t afford training, you can’t afford food and time to stay competitive.

On the other hand the women 100 m world record has been the same for almost 40 years now ( 36, to be more precise), I don’t see how anyone could improve on that by a wide margin in the next 40 years.

Improvements in womens’ sprint times ceased the same time drug testing got good enough to catch all the androgens then in use.

Today’s women doubtless could beat those records with modern gear and pharmaceutical enhancements.

Include transgender athletes and record improves a lot. There is no reason why women should be slower than males.

Your solution to improving women records is to bring biological males?

Not to "bring", they are already there! Just stop discrimination!

So, you're making a very particular point, in such a way that it is easy to misunderstand. Normally, just saying "women" or "men" is fine, but in this instance, sports generally refer to biological sex, not social gender, because biology discriminates. Individuals with biological male sex have higher bone densities, more ability to gain muscle, tend to be taller, larger, etc. "Women", as in gender, not sex, should not be slower, this is true, but "women", as in sex, will be slower due to biology.

The physical disparity is not a social issue, it's biology; the social component can be argued, however. How we choose to categorize within sports is in our control and opinions will go either way - in my opinion, the separation of men's and women's sports was done to try to correct for that physical disparity caused by biology, if that's undone, I think the top records will be dominated by individuals with biological male sex, regardless of gender, in all categories.

As well as the drug allegations, there are claims that the record run was unfairly wind-assisted (if there's a tailwind greater than 2 m/s, the record doesn't count).

The anemometer at the track was reading zero during the race, but people there on the day say it was windy, and the anemometer at the triple jump a few metres away read over 4 m/s. So the suggestion is that the track anemometer wasn't functioning.

> a women running the estimated absolute fastest speed for 100 m would have beaten the world's fastest male in 1955

Maybe it's because they had less body weight to "move".

I was hoping this would be a more mechanical/physics defined limit. Along the lines of "given bone shapes and mass, muscle mass, maximum twitch speed, and energy expenditure, we determined the maximum performance combinations and their physical limits."

Let's say we have a 100 kg sprinter capable of anaerobically producing 20 watt/kg for up to 10s.

How fast could they reach 100 m from a standing start, in a vacuum, with perfect traction?

Having forgotten how to set up simple integrals, I've consulted the interwebs, which claim d = (8*P/9*m)^1/2 * t^3/2

Assuming I can still do algebra, that's t = (d / (8P/9m)^1/2)^2/3 ~= a little over 8 sec ?

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Zd-70dCstI&t=55s

without androgens, that'd be 15 watt/kg for 9 sec.

unless you're a horse, in which case without androgens, with wind resistance and less than perfect traction, while carrying a 57kg human, it's possible to do 101m in 6,67 sec.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86isg0zNpi8&t=80s

I don’t think the title is accurate. And this isn’t about biology. The biology is there and the author dismisses it in Introduction and proceeds to go down the statistics rabbit hole. A golden opportunity to discuss how we can obtain limits of locomotion while adhering to thermodynamics was lost. There’s no physiology in here. Instead, we have plots of past competitions and silly predictions to go along with it.

I suppose I’m asking too much of the author to write the “Tire & Vehicle Dynamics” book applied to the human body but, one can dream I suppose.

Yeah, I was hoping for something building on this kind of work: https://simtk.org/projects/runningsim There is definitely a speed at which your muscles would have to exert more force than bones/tendons can handle, for example. And then there is probably a muscle/weight tradeoff.

> And then there is probably a muscle/weight tradeoff

For sprinting I don't know that there is, given that muscles are capable of exerting more force than their weight.

if you're a data guy, then that's what you do.

If there are absolute limits, they are probably in the ligaments. See my answer above about baseball pitchers.

> If there are absolute limits, they are probably in the ligaments.

Maybe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulnar_collateral_ligament_reco...:

“Some baseball pitchers believe that they can throw harder after ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction than they did beforehand. As a result, orthopedic surgeons have reported that parents of young pitchers have asked them to perform the procedure on their uninjured sons in the hope that it will increase performance. However, many people, including Frank Jobe, believe that any postsurgical increases in performance are most likely the result of the increased stability of the elbow joint and pitchers' increased attention to their fitness and conditioning. Jobe believed that rather than allowing pitchers to gain speed, the surgery and rehab protocols merely allow pitchers to return to their pre-injury levels of performance.”

(I don’t see that header “misconceptions” follow from that paragraph, which says “some people believe A, others believe not-A”)

Also, even if ligaments can’t be trained to be stronger and can’t be replaced by something stronger, longer arms should lead to faster throws for the same forces on those ligaments, wouldn’t it?

well, there's always surgery, isn't there? Bionic pitchers.

Longer arms: maybe. The tallest pitchers aren't the fastest, though. And there will probably never be a human with a 10 foot wingspan.

There have always been pitchers with unhittable fastballs, but often they can't control them and they walk too many batters.

Looking at <100 years of data, fitting a logistic equation to it and concluding that the limit is close to the current plateau is ... unsatisfying.

Maybe that's an unfair summary, there is more statistic rigor than that in the paper. But nonetheless the observed time period seems way too small to support any conclusion

I was similarly wondering whether the author has tried taking a subset of the data and seeing if the result still comes out the same. It seems mildly suspect that, in each case, it just so happens that we've just about reached the limit. By excluding recent data, there can't be a bias to recent values

It depends a bit on your model of the observed performance improvements. Do we have better training and nutrition (a logistic model seems simplistic if so)? Do we simply perform better when we have other high-performing peers to compete against (in which case the logistic model isn't perfect, but it's not terrible -- you'd expect an exponential increase in population to have enough additional brackets to get every constant, additive gain, and assuming logistic growth for the population a logistic curve-fitting roughly inverts that function)?

At best though, it's a model of what _will_ be achieved, as opposed to the hypothetical bounds on those achievements if we were going to invest resources into hitting them.

What it incredibly frustrating to me that is on the one hand, we might somewhat glibly say that we know we can ignore the data for the preceding 5000 years because we know that all the fastest performances have been in the last century.

But merely saying that then leads to the question: do we actually know that?

And what's frustrating is that I don't there is any way to be confident about any answer to that question.

I think we can. We have archeological records showing us what even the fittest people looked like and what clothes they wore. Modern equipment is so much better than what ancient people had access to, it’s just not even close.

Better nutrition means people can get bigger/stronger more easily. Easier access to training equipment amplifies this.

The access to information we have means even more people can train more optimally than people in the past possibly could.

The sheer volume of people gives us statistical probability that genetic freaks will appear more frequently.

All of these gives us more confidence that current records are “true” records.

Right. A data-based approach is unsatisfying. Here is a related question:

How fast can a baseball pitcher throw a ball? Will we ever see a 125 mph fastball? There's no equipment involved (running shoes, etc.)

I saw an physics-based analysis of this once, based on the tendons in the arm and shoulder. Your muscles might get stronger and your mechanics might be optimized, but the tendons do not improve. At what speed will they just snap?

This video is only a little bit about that, when the physiologist mentions the ligaments. It's hugely entertaining, though:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8udNOTFiqUs

Interesting fact: humans are well built for shedding excess heat, which is a limiting factor in long races. It is possible under the right weather conditions for a man to outrun a horse.

I am not a researcher here, but I have read that some believe this contributed to early human success, as it allowed humans to essentially run down their prey over long distances. For instance, as a bow hunter, I have observed how short distance a deer can actually flat out run before what appears to be lack of "something", not lack of fear. That something being energy or physical constraints of some kind.

I am also a long distance runner with ultra marathons under my belt and I believe that humans are great at sustained long distance. Anything can sprint fast for a short distance, but it requires a unique combination of human qualities to sustain medium speed over great distances.

Since I’ve started owning dogs I’ve realized how much of an advantage we, humans, have as a species because we can sweat and hence regulate our temperature through almost all of our body, while on the other hand dogs can only do that through their tongues (afaik).

Dogs have a higher surface-area-to-volume ratio, which helps, though the fur of course hinders.

On a related note, I've speculated for years that tongues play a major cooling role for whales. These are highly vascularised structures which can be exposed to tremendous water flows (for effective thermal transfer). The animals otherwise have an immense metabolism, and are largely quite well insulated by blubber. And of course cannot effectively sweat. Even if the usual problem is heat retention, highly-energetic activities (long-distance migration, escape from or combat with predators, feeding activities) might result in excess heat which needs to be shed quickly. As a long-time swimmer myself I've experienced overheating even in relatively cool waters (for humans) and the challenges in reducing core temps. There have been multiple cases of open-water swimmers overheating and even dying swimming in warm temperatures (several in the middle-east over the past decade or so).

I'd just written that I'd found no scientific literature discussing this when I attempted another search (using FastGPT from Kagi, which I'm finding quite useful for this sort of thing). And lo! Two hits:

"Thermoregulation in the mouths of feeding gray whales" (1997) <https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9353198/> doi: 10.1126/science.278.5340.1138.

"The blood vessel network in the tongues of gray whales precools blood to avoid heat loss via counter-current heat exchange." <https://asknature.org/strategy/lingual-rete-precools-blood/>

This actually discusses structures of the tongue which reduce thermal transfer, but also specifically addresses the characteristics of the tongue which make it effective at thermal transfer:

Baleen whales such as the gray whale move huge quantities of cold ocean water through their very large mouths and across the filtering surface of the baleen. The tongue of a whale can represent as much as 5% of its total body surface area. The whale’s body is well insulated with blubber but not the tongue. Thus, to avoid losing too much of its body heat to the cold water passing through its mouth, the gray whale’s tongue has the largest counter-current heat exchanger yet described.

I feel vindicated!

I live in a very hot location, and I also happen to like going for long runs. I've long known, if I took my dog with me on my run, it would kill him. Even though he's a fit young dog, there's no way he can handle the heat at running pace for that length of time.

There is a race based on that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon

It’s often fairly close between human and horse

Posted recently though little discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41213618>

A huge advantage a human has is a will. A man will keep going far beyond where a horse will just quit.

The horse may quit not because of lack of will, but simply because it is physically unable to go on. The body just stops working properly after a certain point.

A man will drive himself to much more exhaustion than a horse.

There is in fact ample history of horses worked to exhaustion:

"When Horses Posed a Public Health Hazard" (2008):

The horses posed another sanitation problem when they dropped dead — sometimes from overwork, sometimes from disease...

<https://archive.nytimes.com/cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/...>

Similar concerns were key in the formation of the SPCA in Britain and the United States:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSPCA>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_for_the_Preve...>

The legend that concerns over animal welfare inspired creation of San Francisco's cable cars ... seems unfounded:

Many people have heard the story of Andrew Hallidie inventing the cable car after seeing horses slip and fall to their death on the hilly cobblestones of San Francisco. The story feels right—as an animal lover, Hallidie went on to found the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals—and has achieved mythical status in San Francisco.

But it’s not true.

Hallidie was motivated by a much more prosaic demand: making money.

<https://sfstandard.com/2023/11/18/san-francisco-cable-cars-d...>

(Hallidie also didn't invent the cable car, though his father invented, and he advanced, steel wire rope technology and its applications, including in cable cars.)

Hallidie did help found the SPCA, so he clearly had some concern for animal welfare.

I presume there is a difference between driving a horse with a whip and the horse driving himself.

that's absolutely not how horses work. just like people athletes, horse athletes have a very strong competitive spirit. they understand they are competing and the good ones really love it. they will push themselves extremely hard, easily to the point of injury or exhaustion if not pulled back. a good horse also trusts his rider and will do what the rider asks, simply because he asked. if you were to ride a horse like that to exhaustion and then ask it to go on and on, he would, just because you asked, until he physically collapsed.

you may be thinking of mules, who are famous for refusing to overwork themselves.

A horse having its own will is different from a horse being pushed by its rider.

a man isn't going to run himself to death either. unless you have better friends than me, it'd take a lot more than a little ask or pushing for one of your friends to run themselves to collapse or to death just because you kept asked him to. would you "will" yourself to run yourself to death? few would argue they would or could.

further, from the conclusion: "The case for defined limits in horses and dogs is particularly strong" and "... race speeds in these animals have not increased in the last 40–60 years. Thus, for horses and dogs, a limit appears to have been reached"

"The situation is less clear cut for humans, in particular for men" and "data suggest that a limit to male human speed exists, and that this speed is only a few per cent greater than that observed to date. But unlike speeds in horses and dogs, and sprint speeds for women, speeds for men have not yet reached a plateau"

So if human men have this "will power" advantage, why have they not yet improved to their plateau? (which is still far below the horse)? they certainly have plenty of coaches asking and "pushing" them, and many other strong incentives to go faster.

to me it suggests that is not will power that is an advantage at all, it's instead a willingness to do what is asked just for the sake of it. great horses just have a really big heart and they do love to run. that's their advantage.

> if human men have this "will power" advantage, why have they not yet improved to their plateau?

"data suggest" isn't a strong argument for where that plateau might be. Your argument seems to also omit the application of science to training - has that been applied to animals? Does a dog communicate with his trainer with the depth and accuracy that an athlete does?

Human athletes improve over the years likely because of:

1. better training methods

2. better nutrition

3. drugs

4. more incentives

5. better attitudes and mindset

Human minds are far more capable than horse minds, and so can have goals and make tradeoffs that horse minds are incapable of. This is the basis of having a superior will.

Do horses make plans for the future? I seriously doubt it.

>"data suggest" isn't a strong argument

not my argument, not my words, quoted from from TFA.

> has that been applied to animals?

yes 100% it has.

> Does a dog communicate with his trainer with the depth and accuracy that an athlete does?

yes. i'm more familiar with horses, but the connection between rider/trainer and horse is very deep and precise. people build walls.

your points 1 - 4 are 100% applicable to animals just as well

in my opinion, point 5 is solidly won by the animal athletes

> Human minds are far more capable than horse minds, and so can have goals and make tradeoffs that horse minds are incapable of.

precisely. mind, and will, is not an advantage for raw performance. that's why for example donkeys and mules don't perform like horses - they are technically smarter.

> Do horses make plans for the future?

nope. not at all. they 100% live in the moment. they just like to run and love to do what they're asked to. do you see how, for an athlete, that is the almost perfect thing? it takes humans a lot of training to let their minds blank and get "in the zone". we fight against our minds sometimes.

i'm not saying human smarts or will is not an "advantage" overall. but for going fast? not necessarily. it's just not a "A huge advantage" to running.

Walter, i've enjoyed the back/forth. i also really appreciate the things you have done and created, btw. i'm not trying to be argumentative, but i am trying to expose you to how awesome these animal athletes are. really they are extraordinary. they are, in fact, the real-life dragons and mythical creatures we romanticize, and for once it's not an exageration. perhaps it's difficult to convey, but if you ever can, find a good horse to hang out with. they blow people away. even a bog average horse (or a dog) is 1000% the friend and has at least 1000% the heart of anyone you'll know.

I know that dogs have evolved to be man's best friend, and I see that in the attachments friends have with their doggos. Dogs are also fairly intelligent, and with that comes will.

I follow Arnold Schwarzenegger on Twitter (he has a lot of interesting things to say). One thing he said recently was that going to the gym feeling great and having a great workout doesn't get you results. It's when you still go to the gym when feeling bad and unmotivated and sick of working out and you still work out - that's where the gains come from.

That's where the more sophisticated mind comes in - sacrificing the short term for the long term gain.

I simply don't believe that living only in the moment can produce comparable results. If it did, why does evolution trend towards more intelligence?

BTW, as I remarked in a recent interview I did, results (for me) have come from dogged persistence, not any genius (I know actual geniuses, I am not at all like them). It's amazing what anyone can accomplish if they show up and work on it every day.

Years ago, someone complained that I had a "talent for hard work", and that was unfair. That's one of the dumbest things I ever heard.

You obviously know a lot more about horses than I do, I accept that. But I have a couple questions:

1. It the trainer doesn't show up one day, does the horse train itself?

2. I've never seen two riderless horses race each other. Does this ever happen?

If the answer is "no" to both, then the will is coming from the trainer, not the horse.

well, i never said, nor do i believe that a human's will and intelligence is not a good thing in general. we're probably the pinnacle of evolution, around this galaxy at least. what i solidly do not believe is that "willpower" is an advantage in the much more narrow realm of simply going fast, especially for horses. i think it even slightly works against it. it makes sense - same reason we're naked and have bad teeth - there's no evolutionary push to fix what thumbs and brains can overcome.

> dogged persistence, not any genius

i saw or read that interview and agree. 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration as they say. or maybe 1% inspiration, 50% perspiration, and 49% luck as i sometimes feel.

> If the trainer doesn't show up one day, does the horse train itself?

1. well, yes, they do. they have a strong desire to stay fit and every day we turn them out and they run. it's awesome because they are so fast and good at running. pure joy as they run just as fast as they can. there are plenty of videos of barrel race horses running the pattern by themselves when let loose in an arena, just because they love to do it.

> I've never seen two riderless horses race each other. Does this ever happen?

2. oh absolutely! they love to race each other just for fun and it's probably as fast as they ever go, without a riders weight. we limit how often we turn two young ones out together because they might overdo it and hurt themselves. it's sometimes a show of dominance, but mostly its buddies playing. horses form very close "buddy" relationships and they legitimately play with each other. and play means "run" for horses. they'll run along the fence line, just as fast as they can go until they are totally winded. tails in the air, loving life. not worried at all about your vet bills.

my perspective is this: quarter horses (which are what i have) are the 5th fastest land animal. they are basically evolutionarily perfect for what they do: sprinting. some sources say 55mph but all sources say north of 44mph.

unlike humans they do not need external motivation because they were just built for running. they do not care about the short term, long term, or any other things like that. they do very much like alfalfa. and carrots, and neck scritches. that's basically it.

as with all specialists, however, they are also relatively fragile and while good at a few pretty specific things, they are poorly adapted at other things. like not dying when a plastic bag floats by on the wind, or by forgetting to drink. their digestive system is primitive and rather poorly "designed". if they get stressed out because a you moved something in their environment, they might die of a stomach ache. horses actually invented aspergers and they all have a serious case of it.

more motivations, more intelligence, more will would not improve the speed of a horse, even if it had a human-like concept of that. just as this article implied, racing horses have likely achieved their penultimate performance potential.

willpower is important to human performance, sure. but horses are not human.

horses aren't overall "better" than us, generalist, thumb wielding, humans. but they are indisputably: much bigger, much faster, eat a lot more, and are truer friends.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastest_animals

> narrow realm of simply going fast

Endurance, not speed. Endurance means pushing through the pain. Speed is not about that - sprinting 50 yards as hard as you can is not painful.

Thanks for the info about the horses. Interesting!

Obligatory related paper:

"in the future, the fastest humans on the planet might be a quadrupedal runner at the 2048 Olympics, which may be achieved by shifting up to the rotary gallop and taking longer strides with wide sagittal trunk motion."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4928019/

Today I learned there is such a thing as human quadrupedal rubbing. https://youtu.be/RZlvWpeC208?si=xsii66h2cPtjH6ba

15.7 seconds to run 100 meters on all fours is pretty impressive, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3h0AkNNP70

Seems like it would be hard on the wrists.

Have you ever had the chance to see a Greyhound in real life? They are so beautiful.

The host website is as interesting as the article:

http://biologists.com

Interesting perspective!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com