The humans who outrun horses
smh.com.au
smh.com.au
Not actually correct. Jumping doesn't scale with height. Potential energy at peak height is m x g x h. Jumping energy is f x d. Mass scales with body height cubed. Force is proportional to body height squared (via muscle cross-section) and the distance your legs are pushing on the ground (as you start jumping) is proportional to body length.
(l x l x l) x g x h ~ (l x l) x l ... so ... g x h ~ constant ... there's no scaling at all!
A similarly shaped (but very differently sized) human, elephant, cat, and grasshopper should be able to jump roughly the same height. The difference is, grasshoppers are jumping machines, and elephants have a very different body plan.
However, the elephant's leg would buckle on landing. Buckling strength goes down with height.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/01/080110-AP-ti...
If a human sized cat has about 1m more reach than a cat (higher CoG, longer "arms", etc) then they should be able to get to the top of a backboard (about 3m), by raising their CoG by about 2m.
I just immediately assume that anyone who says "if X was the size of a human" is wrong, because there's so many bad examples.
Horses, on the other hand, have been bred for qualities like endurance over the millenniums of human domestication.
With any other animal, on 22 miles, my money would be on the human. Horses are maybe the only quadruped that stands a chance in a marathon.
While I like your enthusiasm, recall that most species that ever lived are now extinct. What makes you so sure that a few hundred million years' worth of evolution never produced a better endurance athlete that had fitness for a time but subsequently died out as Nature moved the goalposts?
I believe the Ostrich and the Antelope would disagree.
Pronghorn Antelopes, on the other hand, can maintain speeds of 60 mph for miles at a time. "If the Cheetah and pronghorn were running side by side, and if the track was longer than a quarter of a mile, the pronghorn would win it, no contest," Carmi Penny, director of collections at the San Diego zoo says. While cheetahs have flexible spines which allow their legs to spend more time pushing off the ground, antelopes have long thin limbs that allow them to run both fast and economically. These legs, paired with tremendous aerobic capacity, are what allow the antelopes to outrun most predators. When you get to long distances, the antelopes can sustain 30 mph for about an hour.
Read more: Long Distance Running Biomechanics – Marathons in the Animal Kingdom - Popular Mechanics
This is a video of human hunters (Koi San, an African ethnic group that has been pushed to extinction over the last millennia by the Bantu tribes) chasing down a kudu antelope. Antelope are great runners, but they can't cool themselves as efficiently as humans. It's a beautiful video, and the way the hunter reacts after the kill is very moving.
The fact is that humans are the most intelligent species (excluding dolphins and mice) and have used that to their advantage. For example, carrying water and weapons. Since these tribesmen can carry water they can replenish water that the other animal cannot. If the tribemen and the antelope had the same amount of water (none) who would win?
Also, I'm not sure if it is the case in this video (also, my audio is not working so I'm at a loss for anything said during the video), it wasn't clear if they were using a triangle approach where you have two hunters on either side and one in the middle. In that instance the antelope might run back-and-forth over that long distance and not run in a straight line (meaning it ran farther, just not smarter).
Even if we disregard the benefits from a higher intelligence it still only says "humans are great long distance runners in hot/flat terrain when carrying water". For example, try out-jogging a deer this December in the midwestern wilderness, or slap on some tennis and try to wear out a husky when it is twenty-below and 30mph winds.
When I read this for a split second I was thinking "man, how can this guy think dolphins are smarter than humans? And mice? What is he think... oohh, Heheh! Nice.
Sorry, you're wrong, and that book is not a particularly accurate reference. Read http://www.sbrunning.org/Reviews/BookWhyWeRun.htm for some sanity on this.
As an example of a better long-distance runner, there was a kangaroo which was observed in the wild, to have travelled 200 miles in 10 hours. Since it probably did not go in a straight line, it likely travelled farther.
That's almost 8x the distance of a marathon, at around 50% faster than the absolute best human marathon time, all done over wild terrain.
Sled dogs in the ididitrod regularly go 15 mph for 6 hours. That's faster than a human does a marathon, for several times the distance, while dragging a heavy object behind them.
We're designed for running long distances, and do very well at it for a primate. But we are very, very far from being champions at it.
But the kangaroo was traveling in an environment that is hotter than humans are OK running in. Camels are another good runner, in camel races they regularly maintain speeds comparable to top notch marathoners for about 2x the distance while running in conditions hot enough that a running human would collapse from heat stroke.
So yes, cooling matters. But if you're trying to squeeze out a niche for running long distances in hot weather, you still are going to have extreme trouble finding a regime where we are best.
If you really want humans to win, you need a combination obstacle course/distance run. There is nothing that runs at our speed for long distances that can also climb. Of course once you go into that niche, we're no longer being judged on our ability to run, are we?
The record time in the ididarod represents dogs running on average at close to that speed, through snow, while towing a load, for about 1100 miles. Of course the dogs were only running for a fraction of that time. They needed breaks to eat, sleep, etc. And they carried all of their food. I guarantee that Karl Metzer could not, even under ideal circumstances, manage to run 1100 miles in anywhere close to comparable time.
Also let's go back to that kangaroo. Researchers happened to notice that one ran about 2x the distance that Karl did in half the time that he did. There is no particular reason to believe that the kangaroo could not have done the same thing the next day.
I don't care how you slice it. There is simply no way that humans are the best long-distance runners on the planet.
It's only relevant how long they can run without a break; not how far or how far they can run in a given time.
You seem to completely miss the point everyone is making about humans being long distance runners; they mean a single run without stopping to rest. The point is the human cooling system that allows man to run continuously without overheating like animals seem to.
> Also let's go back to that kangaroo. Researchers happened to notice that one ran about 2x the distance that Karl did in half the time that he did.
I'll remind you again, Kangaroos don't run. :)
Anyways, you claim the point is that we have a cooling system that lets us keep going. Wonderful. According to http://www.austcamel.com.au/cache/Training%20of%20Camels.htm it is not hard for a well-trained camel to run about 10 miles an hour for about 50 miles without stopping to rest. That would mean that it is running like a human marathoner (not ultramarathoner) long enough to be running all of the way through the heat of the day, in an environment that is uncomfortably hot for people.
Our ability to keep running through heat does not seem to exceed what camels can do.
Now what is the real human upper limit by your current standard? The longest race that I'm aware of anyone running without sleep is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westfield_Sydney_to_Melbourne_U.... 544 miles, and the best human time is 5 days, 2 hours, and 28 minutes. That's about 4.44 mph.
I do not know of a recorded case where an animal ran that distance without stopping to rest. Wonderful! We win at something!
HOWEVER there are animals that could start on that starting line, travel on foot, leave the humans behind in the dust, and then the humans would never, ever catch up to the animal. Not at 100 miles. 1000 miles. Or 10,000 miles. Despite the fact that the animal took breaks.
To me that is a meaningful definition of "better long distant runner". And by that definition, we are not the best. (We are very, very good, but not the best.)
I think you're confused about who you're talking to, I said no such thing.
But still the fact that that was said by someone else demonstrates that the definition of "long distance running" that you want to use is not universally accepted by everyone else in this discussion.
10 miles apart for horse changes.
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2012/06/long...
I love David Attenborough.
Apart from that, I wonder how the long-distance running speed of animals without rider is measured. Seems like an interesting endeavor, since animals will run long distances only if they have to, which I suppose won't happen often.
Humans don't suffer from this limitation. If you're curious I suggest you read Born To Run
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Born-Run-Hidden-Ultra-Runners-Greate...
And I've often heard people complaining that training horses in hot weather is horrible because they get sweaty and all the dust sticks to them.
While I have never myself witnessed a horse sweat, I've read/heard enough references to the sweatines of horses that I assume horses do in fact ... sweat.
rid
If you ever watch a horse race or any other time a horse is working hard and fast, you'll see white foam near where the reins touch the horse's neck and and anywhere else there's friction. That's frothed up sweat.
Not only is a bipedal gait more efficient over long distances, but the fact that humans have a mostly hairless torso which is directly perpendicular to the direction they are running means two things: a maximum amount of surface area of sweaty skin is being exposed to moving air vs. body mass it has to cool. Much greater than a quadraped's.
I also wonder about the preparation of the horses. Marathon runners are, in general, fantastically and specifically well trained for their sport. Are the horses involved specifically trained for endurance racing or just generally fit horses? Are they elite endurance racers? If the horses are specifically trained, does the fact that most equine endurance races are 50 or 100 miles effect the training of the horses?
It explains a lot of the bio mechanics involved in running and why humans are so superior.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/health/27well.html
I highly suggest reading the book itself - it's quite an eye opener.
http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/episode/the-perfect-runner....
(If you're really keen, the above link includes references under "resources".)
The article seems a big cribbed quite frankly in that it mostly talks about the a subset of the same things the NoT episode did, only in less detail. The man vs. horse marathon was not in the NoT though.
If you are interested enough in this to watch a 40 minute documentary then the NoT episode is highly recommended. It might be difficult to find for those outside of Canada unfortunately.
4.2 meters per second 15.1km/h. That's faster than any jogger.
6.5 meters per second is 23.4 km/h which is faster than my treadmill goes. Can humans really sustain that speed over a a marathon distance?
I may have looked at my calendar during a moment of non-clarity of thought to make sure today wasn't April Fool's day. In case you're wondering, it's not. It's August 31.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/80/ru...