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Comment by Mistletoe | Hacker News Reader

I'm a runner and have had a weird question, could a runner defeat a larger human in this way? Like if I found myself in mortal combat with The Rock at 260 lbs after his steroids cycle, could I just repeatedly run away and follow him (while staying out of range) until he tired out and then bonk him on the head with a rock, like a tired antelope? (No offense to The Rock, seems like a great guy)

Might explain why we aren't all musclebound and huge? Although I'm sure food availability had more influence.

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Somewhat related anecdote: When a friend of mine was in college, he got into some sort of amicable debate with another friend and they decided the way to resolve it was through a boxing match. Neither of them had an ounce of boxing experience.

My friend realized before the match that just holding the gloves up and swinging punches is more tiring than you'd think. So the strategy he settled on was to just put his guard up and not attack at all. He let his friend take a bunch of swings at him until eventually the poor guy was literally too tired to hold his arms up. Then my friend started swinging and quickly won.

Was your friend perhaps Muhommed Ali, fighting George Foreman in Zaire? Or perhaps Homer Simpson fighting Drederick Tatum?

I think you mean Homer Simpson vs. Boxcar Bob.

The Rock would be bad at persistence hunting, but it would be weird if he was so susceptible to persistence hunting. What incentive does he have to fatigue himself in this scenario? When it's you vs animal, the animal runs from you since if you catch it you kill it. The Rock could just chill and say bring it on. If you were sufficiently mobile and clever, maybe you could prevent him from reaching food and water until he's weak enough for you to attack.

Unfortunately the hunter might find himself with nowhere left to turn, stuck between the Rock and a hard place.

This punchline is so good I wonder if you and the grandparent poster coordinated this. Bravo.

Make him angry (by publicly confronting him about his juicing or something) and have him want to chase you down.

Juicing is gaining a lot of legitimacy lately. Not that it’s any better for you at this point but there are a lot of bodybuilders publicly talking about it. Its being normalized pretty rapidly which is a definitely not a good thing.

If you knew how to use a sling, and The Rock didn't, you could try to make The Rock chase you by staying out of his range and slinging rocks at him. Reverse persistence hunting.

I think this sort of technique is used in boxing and MMA: play a good defense, stay out of trouble, and let the aggressor exhaust themselves until later rounds when you feel you may have a fitness advantage. I think there were good examples of this in the early days of MMA, when there was much less, if any, specialized training, techniques and strategy. It's probably much less effective now, since a well trained aggressor will know how to pace themselves too.

Letting your opponent gas out is an effective strategy.

Short answer no. This is because what gets exhausted is aerobic capacity. When you get within striking range The Rock will still have access to fast twitch muscles & some reduced amount of glycogen for energy release. This would probably be enough to grab you and choke you out. Basically the Mountain vs the Viper fight from game of thrones.

If you were of similar size then yes. Basically being smaller really sucks in a fight. So if you can reasonably deflect the Rocks wrestling & grappling offensive you could rope a dope him causing him to gas out and then win. Higher weight MMA fighters & boxers use this tactic all the time. They let their opponent “punch themselves out” and then get off their own offense.

Wouldn’t the endurance preferred human eventually reach a safe distance and not have to fight?

Also known as "running away", the first line of self defence.

Nope. OP stipulated that at some point mortal combat happens and also suggests that it happens within arms length for example dropping a large rock on an even larger Rock.

Layman: skeletal muscles are expensive to maintain in terms of caloric and protein/water intake, and larger muscles are less efficient at dumping the heat that their use generates because volume increases faster than exposed surface area with muscular hypertrophy. If food and body temperature regulation were more immediate concerns than violent conflict, then the ability to gas out your opponent was probably less influential.

I've thought about this kind of scenario, bizarrely, a decent amount recently. Long story short, assuming your opponent is so strong that once you're in arms' reach, you're done, you have to be faster than said opponent not only at endurance running but also at every distance between. E.g. assuming you start off somewhat close to them, you have to sprint faster and transition into a faster endurance running pace, and at no point can you be so much slower than them at a given distance that they're able to regain any ground you made on them at a different speed.

The reason it works against deer is that they can only get rid of a certain amount of heat; once they reach their maximum temperature they are not able to continue moving.

The Rock, being human is able to exhaust at least as much heat as you, taking away from your advantage.

>The Rock, being human is able to exhaust at least as much heat as you, taking away from your advantage.

I'm not so sure about this. The Rock has only slightly more surface area than I do (due to his larger physical size); it's not a huge amount more, certainly not double. However, he has much more muscle mass than I do, probably more than double. Therefore, his surface-area/muscle-mass ratio should be lower, meaning he should have less ability to exhaust heat than me. (Muscle mass is what generates all the heat.) Therefore, over time, he should get overheated more quickly than me, though of course this depends entirely on our relative physical activity while we're trying to fight or avoid the other.

However people who exercise a lot, sweat more efficiently; so I figure it should be roughly equal.

Then instead of comparing non-pro-athlete me with The Rock, let's pick some professional runner or cyclist.

Why would he chase you if he could never catch you?

He would just sit down and try to stay awake longer than you and then bop you on the head.

It is called persistence hunting and practiced by humans & animals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting

A corollary might be military special forces.

The biggest most muscular individuals rarely make it through training eval.

Even though you need to run with 70lb rucksack, it’s typically the fit & trim person (lighter body weight) who succeeds.

What you're suggesting seems similar to rope-a-dope.

Absolutely a successful strategy.

What if the threw a rock at you? He has longer range and a stronger lift.

He's literally The Rock. He's not gonna throw his fam

Wasn't there a Game of Thrones episode which had this exact scenario? As I recall, it didn't go well for the runner guy.

Probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mountain_and_the_Viper

I think the term you're looking for is endurance.

Endurance advantage is a big factor in many sports and offers a viable strategy.

The issue with your suggestion is that it's not uncommon for massive heavy athletes to also have excellent endurance too, so even if they may not catch you, they would still be the one stalking you.

I'm a big guy, 6'5", 255 (aiming for 240), plenty of muscle, and when I was a young kid and teen I cycled a _lot_. I kept cycling through my 20s, and did a tremendous amount of walking too for enjoyment. At my peak I could run a mile in just under 7 minutes. I did the 50 and 100m sprints freshman year of high school for track and won a fair amount. I was on the swim team. And despite all of that, yes, the cross country kids had more stamina than me, although I could beat them in sprints.

So, anecdotally, yeah, me vs a runner and the runner takes off? If I don't catch them within a couple of hundred yards, they're gone. I can walk or cycle at a medium pace all day, but distance runners will beat me in marathons every single time. In caveman times I'd have been the closer, the guy who catches up to the runners and finishes off the bear or tiger or elephant when it's exhausted.

And what if he has a decoy snail?

Is your name Fabian, by chance?

Another apt ancient example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Sphacteria

Lightly-armed Athenians trapped heavily-armed Spartans in hilly terrain, and instead of fighting them in a phalanx, wore them down with a long day of hit-and-run. Hundreds of exhausted Spartans were taken alive, which was a massive scandal for the Spartan reputation at the time.

i don't think it would work on human vs human because the other one would go find a tool to work in their advantage. In this case, The Rock would get a gun and a car and then you're SOL.

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