Whats good about the racewalk?

Would you say the same thing about different strokes in swimming? The backstroke and butterfly are slower than the freestyle aren't they? I guess those are just more crap rules to slow them down...

Oh Canada wrote:

Re previous comment: "Most people can ignore the straight leg rule: a few people cannot straighten the leg at all, but otherwise walking and landing on the heel is more or less impossible without a straight leg. And unless you are advanced you can ignore the 'one foot on the ground' rule as well; you will not be able to walk fast enough to begin with to come close to violating this."

The above comment is total crapolla (spelling?). Although I 'only' won three well judged national racewalk championship races up to the 50Km (team and individual titles) in the late 1970s and early 1980s (four if you count an AAU National "B" title in 1977), I can attest from experience that you can indeed legally achieve decent speed when racewalking.

I think maybe you misinterpreted what I wrote. I completely agree that one can achieve good speed legally. My comment was for people who have not tried racewalking, and was meant to say that the two rules are not artificial: if you are actually walking (not running) and land on your heel (with the front of the foot inclined somewhat), most people should be legally race walking. It is only when you walk fast that you are in any danger of losing contact (that is not to say that one has to lose contact to walk fast).

Okay I got you, sir. Please accept my apology.

Yep read it wrong and jump to the wrong conclusion. I am just a bit thin-skinned about the topic in general.

Usually I don't even comment on these posts - just push the keyboard away. But it massively just pisses me off that most who should know better (i.e 'serious' runners) think RWing is some type of fluff sport. Nothing easy about it, if done legally.

Done properly, is a bear to legally race fast and stay within the rules.

Last rant - It equally pisses me off that certain current (masters) racewalkers (who are on the LetsRun forum-you know who you are) think it okay to cheat as long as long as they don't get DQ'd.

Time for me to go do an easy five miles, I got my blood pressure up....

You're purposely not going as fast as you can wrote:

I think race walk is dumb because it's enforcing stupid rules to not allow the person to go as fast as they can.

Why should there be hurdles? Aren't those just an artificial hindrance to covering a set distance as fast as you can? Or if you insist on having hurdles/barriers, why mandate going over them, rather than through them, or around them? Why not allow javelin throwers to turn their backs to the throw? Why not allow high jumpers to take off from two feet? Why not allow long jumpers to do a forward flip? And, as someone pointed out already, why specify different strokes in swimming--why not just go with what's fastest?

...Because there's a challenge to do one's best, and try to outperform others, in limiting circumstances. Because some events (like racewalk) are traditional and limiting circumstances have defined the events for well over a century.

If you want to make an analogy between race walking and bike racing I think a better one would be a bike race where the bikes could only have one gear or had to weigh a minimum number of pounds. Another analogy is to swimming where you have free style races but you also have races where you can only use one particular stroke.

One thing that always puzzles me about this topic, and it's not new, is why people who don't like race walking get so worked up about it. Just don't watch it.