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We've previously discussed the possibility of running a two hour marathon (with much of the usual wit in this thread). For a comparison against running one mile in four minutes, running at the pace of a five minute mile would be too slow. Like running a mile in four minutes, people said running a marathon in two hours was impossible. However, it is looking very possible with advanced footwear and suchlike. Specifically, Kenyan marathon runner Eliud Kipchoge was within 0.4% of this goal. Variously reported as being 25 seconds or 26 second too slow, his effort is an unofficial world record.
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Two Hour Marathon Run *Almost* Achieved
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For recreational use only.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by Gaaark on Sunday May 07 2017, @04:21PM (16 children)
I bet if he'd had $6 million dollar bionic legs he coulda done better.
World records shouldn't depend on steroids, equipment, etc.... just the body (or take a baseline: you can use these kinds of running shoes and no others. Without that baseline, how can you say "This athlete is faster at the marathon than any other athlete in history..... *asterisk, he used a car to do the marathon"
Advances in footwear, etc, are just cheats.
"I took 14 bass in that last tournament."
"Is that all? This tournament i took over 200... with muh hand grenade!"
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday May 07 2017, @04:36PM (5 children)
Do the shoes really help - or have the athletes bought into meaningless hype, which helps to sell shoes to the gullible public? A number of the fastest runners have run barefoot, after all.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/quora/can-olympic-runners-compe_b_7942156.html [huffingtonpost.com]
That page properly points out that shoes prevent foot and knee injuries, but I'm not convinced that shoes actually make you any faster. I believed that a long time ago, when Keds shoes were advertised with the "run faster, jump higher" slogan. As a runner, I never found a pair of shoes that actually helped me beat my own record times.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 07 2017, @05:21PM
The shoes can help you run faster, if you adapt your technique.
I bought a pair of new, better running shoes at a specialist store a few years ago. While testing them out in the store, the assistant noted that I subconsciously held back in my step, due to being used to running with cheaper shoes with less efficient shock absorption. With the new shoes, I trained myself out of that habit, and increased my running speed by a couple of minutes on my 10k run.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 07 2017, @07:15PM (1 child)
Shoes definitely help for sprinting. Especially if they are optimized for the track surface. With barefeet you'd slip more during a sprint.
Not so sure for marathon running, assuming the bare feet are toughened and don't need protection. For lesser runners the added mass of the shoe might "outweigh" the advantages the shoe gives over the longer distances and times.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday May 07 2017, @07:47PM
For lesser runners the added mass of the shoe might "outweigh" the advantages the shoe gives over the longer distances and times.
I came up with an engineering model where it boils down to density and human flesh should be a bit denser than water and we should be able to make foamy floating shoes.
From my sailing days I remember extremely mixed results as to which shoes sink an which shoes float.
I suspect thick tough foot callouses are much denser than water rather than just slightly.
In theory we should be able to make shoes that float on water, which would result in legs 1% longer with a net lower density (so a human 1% taller would have higher moment of inertia and higher simple mass). It would be easy to make highly inefficient dress shoes that result in net lower performance AND it would be easy to make super durable tough shoes that are heavier than necessary.
The ideal shoe would be so lightly constructed it doesn't make it past 27 miles before falling apart. A non-ideal shoe would be make of steel toes and leather and last 500 miles of hiking, but ...
This is assuming cold sweaty bare feet aren't thermodynamically relevant in some weird way. Its not entirely ridiculous if we're talking about being 1% taller then carrying 1% mass in sweaty socks or sweaty shoes might be relevant. I'm sure athletes could spray their feet and socks and shoes with scotchguard...
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday May 07 2017, @10:39PM
Buying a $5000 guitar ain't gonna make you sound like Eddie Van Halen unless you're Eddie Fucking Van Halen.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 08 2017, @03:18PM
Shoes probably fuck you over in the long run... pun semi-intended.
(Score: 2) by ticho on Sunday May 07 2017, @04:40PM (6 children)
Yes, let's all stay in caves, any advancement is cheating.
Him winning a race because of good support doesn't affect you personally in any way. On the other hand, many technological advancements that come out of that support will eventually bubble down to everyday life. So why the "I'm so cool nobody can impress me" Negative Nancy attitude? I just don't get people sometimes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 07 2017, @04:58PM
I think You miss the point. The technological advancement is great -- but world records in sports should not be a measure of technological advancement, but a measure of physical effectiveness. If we drape swimmers in dolphin skins, they'd probably become faster in water, but that does not break the limits of human physicality -- swimmers are still the same, regardless of technology. Any advancement is cheating in the sense that it prohibits people people with no access to the technology or a drug that makes You good at that particular sport from competing. It also cheats people from the past -- a person from the past might be better than the best runners of today, but the runners of today outperform his record just thanks to new shoe technology.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday May 07 2017, @05:00PM (4 children)
I have nothing against advancement: i'm saying to keep track of records, it means nothing if 'advancements' are what made the record. For a record to be compared to previous records, there must be a baseline or it is meaningless.
Running a marathon on bionic legs is an advancement, but please don't tell me "there is a new world record". There is just a new record in a different category.
There is no Negative Nancy, just no way to compare records when the records were not done with the same test environment.
The fastest man in the world for running a marathon beat the record while 'running' in his Maserati means nothing but that there is a new category for marathon records.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday May 07 2017, @07:16PM (3 children)
The fastest man in the world for running a marathon beat the record while 'running' in his Maserati
What a wuss. The point of a Marathon is to provide a military report ASAP 26 miles away. I can provide a military report using a radio, thru the atmosphere, to achieve the usual 1 foot per nanosecond. So figure I can do a marathon in 140000 nanoseconds or about a hundred and forty microseconds.
You're gonna get a speeding ticket from God if you try to marathon faster than 140 uS. Its actually a complicated minecraft "potion of slowness" where you think you're moving arbitrarily fast, lets say 1 nS but time dilation gets all funky such that wall clock time to pull it off is looking much worse than 1 nS.
Personally, I would allow steroids. After all, we allow things like smallpox eradication where its cheating to let a guy compete who's "supposed" to be a corpse. Or we allow vitamin pills, ditto, that dude is "supposed" to be suffering from scurvy but here he is running about. Or we allow modern civil engineering to provide safe drinking water where the athlete was "supposed" to have shit himself and died of dehydration but here's those engineers having to change traditional lifestyles can't leave good enough alone. On the big scale of things roids are not relevant.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday May 08 2017, @02:12AM
Bartender... I'll have what he's having! ;)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by joshuajon on Monday May 08 2017, @06:19PM (1 child)
Right, but where does it end? If shoes are allowed what about the bionic legs someone else mentioned? Or stilts? Or can swimmers wear fins? There are actually swim-fin races that use what appears to be a very particular design for the fins. Clearly the gear in that case makes an enormous difference in performance. I think it's an interesting discussion that's not clear cut one way or the other.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday May 08 2017, @06:59PM
Well first of all the Greeks had it right, compete naked. Otherwise as previously mentioned its a battle of shoes.
Secondly F the body. Something always glossed over about the original marathon run was the poor bastard made the run in record time to make his military report and then promptly keeled over and died, dehydration or heart attack or heart attack brought on by dehydration.
Finally its war. "Real olympic events" were VERY thinly disguised war. In warfare no one worries if some random infantry soldier has his knees blow out at 30 or gets shot. The point of the olympics was to work out some killing stress off the battlefield with fewer deaths on the battlefield. The point was not to put pretty faces on cereal boxes. There should be a "real olympics" of throwing spears and shot put and biathlon with rifles and skis and sometimes people die but its glorious and better than dying on the battlefield. Then they have have the womens knitting competition where someone gets their face on packages of knitting needles but its not olympic in any way.
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Sunday May 07 2017, @05:19PM (1 child)
People have already done better without any space age technology.
Here a man is going at 40 miles per hour with a little technological help.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo_oigyFlTA [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday May 07 2017, @06:03PM
Not. for. me.
Ohnonononono, lol
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday May 08 2017, @02:12AM
You could also make it if the time was allowed to be non-contiguous. For example when the microwave timer dings I can be off the couch and next to the beer fridge to pull the popcorn out of the microwave in no time flat. Amortise that over many years and I've run a sub-two-minute marathon.