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posted by martyb on Sunday May 07 2017, @03:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the two-hour-sprint dept.

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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  • (Score: 2) by ticho on Sunday May 07 2017, @04:40PM (6 children)

    by ticho (89) on Sunday May 07 2017, @04:40PM (#505893) Homepage Journal

    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.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 07 2017, @04:58PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 07 2017, @04:58PM (#505902)

    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)

    by Gaaark (41) on Sunday May 07 2017, @05:00PM (#505903) Journal

    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)

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday May 07 2017, @07:16PM (#505949)

      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

        by Gaaark (41) on Monday May 08 2017, @02:12AM (#506127) Journal

        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)

        by joshuajon (807) on Monday May 08 2017, @06:19PM (#506485)

        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

          by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 08 2017, @06:59PM (#506499)

          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.