You're off by a lot. If I'm forced to run the first quarter in 60 seconds, that would mean that there's a guy who's capable of running a sub 60" 500m. There are only 10 people in recorded history who've ever run that fast.
If I'm forced to run the first half mile in 2:20, that would mean that there's a guy who can run a 2:04 800 and maintain that speed for another 100m. I could see that happening in the 18-21 year age group since there are a fair bit of good HS and college athletes. But age 25-29? Most of the HS and college guys wouldn't be anywhere near peak shape, and the odds that any of those 1,000 are pro athletes are vanishingly slim (and even then, it would have to be a pro athlete in a sport like soccer. A pro golfer has no hope of running that fast on golf training).
Running the first mile in 5:10 is no big deal. I've done that a bunch of times in a 5K without blowing up afterwards.
I'm not off at all.
Those people don't have to catch you. They have to push you. They have to scare you. In a population of 1,000 25-29 year olds, is there someone that can run a 60-second quarter? Very well could be. You need to maintain an edge.
The gun goes off and you have NO IDEA who is coming after you. You start to run at a pace that may or may not be good enough, looking over your shoulder. You don't want to over extend.
Here he comes. That gap is closing. You have no idea how fast he is coming or how long he can hold that pace. Your 100 meter lead is shrinking. You accelerate. You run a fast quarter and look back. He's dropped out but there are two more guys not far behind where he was. You have to keep pressing. They are only five seconds back. Are they 800 runners or milers? You have no idea...
And running a 5:10 is a HUGE deal when you have to go for 24 hours and have no idea what that turtle in the middle of the pack might do.
This isn't a group of high school seniors, a group of people at a Planet Fitness, or a group of people at the trailhead of a 14er. It's pretty much a group of men in their late 20s at the local Walmart. Zero depth, and zero chance of anyone running a 55" 400.
You take out the first 400 in 74", the first mile in 5:15, and the first 5K in 19 minutes. Guess what, their best runners are now done, and you're left with people who'll struggle to run a marathon in 4 hours in their current condition. You slow down to a 9 min/mile jog to recover and start thinking about how you want to spend that money...
Though the scenario seems tough and blood-thirsty, was curious to play with math.
I am nearly 66 years old and my PBs (in 2023) were 18:28/5k, 38:03/10K and 1:27:20/HM. Not sure I can run for 24 hrs with short rests, but assume it is possible. Anyway, it seems that the situation would be clear in 2-3 hours if not earlier.
Though I am not in the US, let’s consider the US-related numbers. The above PBs definitely allow me to stay in the top 10 of the 65-69 age group. Assume there are 5 guys faster than me of exactly the same age. According to official statistics there are 13.4 mln males in the 65-74 age category in the US. Assume 1.5 mln are exactly 66. Thus, one of 300K will trample me (5/1.5M), and probability of this (among 1K chosen randomly) is 1/300. But taking “sprinters” into account makes the picture looking much worse. I do not think I would run faster than 4:00/km (6:28/mile) for the first 2 miles to remain alive for the rest of the day and do not let slow marathoners eat me up in 4 hours. This means that somebody who starts at 3:35/km or 11:30/3k (and then stop) would destroy me. And the number of the guys who are able to do that are pretty higher than 5, maybe 50. This results in 1/30 in terms of this “Russian roulette”. And since “the stakes we are gambling are frighteningly high”, I would rather refuse to participate.
This post was edited 2 minutes after it was posted.
Those people don't have to catch you. They have to push you. They have to scare you. In a population of 1,000 25-29 year olds, is there someone that can run a 60-second quarter? Very well could be. You need to maintain an edge.
The gun goes off and you have NO IDEA who is coming after you. You start to run at a pace that may or may not be good enough, looking over your shoulder. You don't want to over extend.
Here he comes. That gap is closing. You have no idea how fast he is coming or how long he can hold that pace. Your 100 meter lead is shrinking. You accelerate. You run a fast quarter and look back. He's dropped out but there are two more guys not far behind where he was. You have to keep pressing. They are only five seconds back. Are they 800 runners or milers? You have no idea...
And running a 5:10 is a HUGE deal when you have to go for 24 hours and have no idea what that turtle in the middle of the pack might do.
This isn't a group of high school seniors, a group of people at a Planet Fitness, or a group of people at the trailhead of a 14er. It's pretty much a group of men in their late 20s at the local Walmart. Zero depth, and zero chance of anyone running a 55" 400.
You take out the first 400 in 74", the first mile in 5:15, and the first 5K in 19 minutes. Guess what, their best runners are now done, and you're left with people who'll struggle to run a marathon in 4 hours in their current condition. You slow down to a 9 min/mile jog to recover and start thinking about how you want to spend that money...
Do you struggle with "randomness"?
There would be many, many of the people from your first group within a population of 1,000 25-year-old me (to pick one age). There would also be many more from your second group. I acknowledge that, but they aren't relevant. It is the ten, or twenty from the 1,000 that are going to organize and catch you. There almost surely (in a group as defined) would be a few who can run close to a 60 second 400, or faster, particularly given the incentives.
And for the part of your post past the 5k point, you have assumed there would not be a single marathon runner in 1,000 men in that age.
How many of the posters who responded confidently to this challenge have actually run for 24 hours? As much as I'd worry about the prospect of a decent soccer player giving me a scare in the first 800m (or at least forcing me to burn myself out early), I'd be more worried about the unknowns of how my body will respond after, say, 16 hours.
There's actually quite a bit of research trying to understand the determinants of ultrarunning performance. If you know VO2max, running economy, and lactate threshold, you can predict someone's marathon time with decent accuracy. Those are the conventional parameters that people with decent PRs over standard distances have maximized. But the longer the distance, the less predictive power they have. You want to know who's going to win a 100-mile race? Doesn't matter what lab tests you do, you won't know until they run the race. Fit runners sometimes hit limits they didn't expect; relatively untrained people sometimes turn out to be unexpectedly good at putting one foot in front of the other for hour after hour. You'd have to be very confident about your 24-hour ability to take this bet, even without the added twist of potentially having to run pretty close to max for the first 5K or so.
Suppose that you and 1,000 people were placed at the west end of a long interstate highway. All traffic is cleared off the road, and at noon, everyone will start running or walking east.
You're given a 100 meter head start. If you can stay ahead of all of them until 11:59 AM the following day, you'll get $100 million. But if any of them pass you at any point before the 24 hours is up, you'll be shot dead.
The 1,000 people are selected at random from the U.S. population but will be the same age and gender as you. They're given the entire morning to coordinate a strategy and will each receive $1 million if any of them pass you. There's water at every mile, but everyone, including you, will have to carry their own food.
Would you take the deal?
Please pose this scenario to Mr. Spencer Brown, he surely will see this as an opportunity to make a video and by him doing so, we can kill 2 birds with 1 stone, or 1 Spencer Brown with 1 failed challenge.
What kind of drugs are you on when you come up with and post this?
1) 100 meters is a tiny lead. The main group would find 5 fastest milers to chase you, followed by a few 5-10k folks and then just some marathoners and a few grinders. They could easily make you hit lactic threshold pretty quickly and tire yourself out while letting the grinders catch you if the 5/10k folks or milers didn't. Maybe a dozen people in the world would have the initial speed to hold off the top milers/then longer distance and still have the endurance to hold off longer distance runners that could go more even pace while still worrying about people that could go slow, stay light aerobic and eventually catch you.
I think you might be overestimating the amount of people who can run fast enough to hurt a person if one if faster runner.
The average age in the USA right now is 38.5, so maybe we should go with "the death march's" example
Based on what I found, .68% of the population is male and 38. That's 2,266,440 people if there are 333 million people in the US. That's still a lot of people, you are not going to really increase the chances of large part of that group being super fast.
The average 5k time for males between 35-40 is apparently almost 34 minutes! So you basically don't have to worry about at least half, if not way more of the 1000.
17:06 is pretty fast for the average person, what are the odds you will get multiple people who can push that person for a mile and then more to push them thru 10k and then more to push them thru a marathon.
You're probably only looking at 1-2 people you have to worry about at most, and hopefully that 100 yard lead is enough.
Any college runner should be able to do this depending on the luck of the draw. Could get unlucky with a sub elite marathoner in the pack and then you're screwed but otherwise, you should be fine. No way I could do it. I was a 16 minute 5k runner so it's a big maybe even in my best shape. What if Galen is randomly selected, or even Des Linden. I'm dead
How many of the posters who responded confidently to this challenge have actually run for 24 hours? As much as I'd worry about the prospect of a decent soccer player giving me a scare in the first 800m (or at least forcing me to burn myself out early), I'd be more worried about the unknowns of how my body will respond after, say, 16 hours.
There's actually quite a bit of research trying to understand the determinants of ultrarunning performance. If you know VO2max, running economy, and lactate threshold, you can predict someone's marathon time with decent accuracy. Those are the conventional parameters that people with decent PRs over standard distances have maximized. But the longer the distance, the less predictive power they have. You want to know who's going to win a 100-mile race? Doesn't matter what lab tests you do, you won't know until they run the race. Fit runners sometimes hit limits they didn't expect; relatively untrained people sometimes turn out to be unexpectedly good at putting one foot in front of the other for hour after hour. You'd have to be very confident about your 24-hour ability to take this bet, even without the added twist of potentially having to run pretty close to max for the first 5K or so.
I'm a mid-30s male and am more of a 5K/10K guy, but I've run a 2:58 marathon last year and would take the bet. I haven't actually run for 24 hours, but I've done some of the longest day hikes in the country - Grand Canyon Rim-to-rim-to-rim, Cactus to Clouds, Mt. Whitney portal to summit and back.
I wasn't attempting an FKT and wouldn't have been close to getting one even if I tried, but those were fairly busy trails, and the only times I got passed were when I stopped for snack breaks. If a bunch of random hikers couldn't pass me, there's no way I'd get passed by people from the general population unless I got really unlucky. You could make the argument that those hikers weren't racing me, but I wasn't racing them either, and I still passed loads of hikers even though I frequently stopped to take pictures of the scenery.
In the end, you are betting to be better of 1000 random people your age on ALL races that last somewhere between 3 minutes and 24 hours. And you need to be better of them all at the same time and in succession (if a random guy better than you at a 24 h race shows up, he just needs to race at his 24 h race pace to beat you, he doesn't need to sprint 50" 400s or other crazy stuff). Very, very dumb bet. Maybe with a 10 km advantage and some experience of ultramarathon I could think of doing it (because I'm 32 years old with 2h32' marathon PR), otherwise it is just dumb.
In the end, you are betting to be better of 1000 random people your age on ALL races that last somewhere between 3 minutes and 24 hours. And you need to be better of them all at the same time and in succession (if a random guy better than you at a 24 h race shows up, he just needs to race at his 24 h race pace to beat you, he doesn't need to sprint 50" 400s or other crazy stuff). Very, very dumb bet. Maybe with a 10 km advantage and some experience of ultramarathon I could think of doing it (because I'm 32 years old with 2h32' marathon PR), otherwise it is just dumb.
+1
AND you are betting to be the better of 1,000 random people your age on ALL races...
AFTER you had to run crazy hard in the first few minutes, and then too hard for the next several minutes, and then far too fast for the first hour (relative to running for 24 hours total), and so on.
To put that another way, it is a 24 hour race (which most people have never done) and you are forced to make massive pacing errors consistently and immediately from the gun.
I posted earlier that if given an over/under, I would bet the average LetsRun poster would be caught within 20 minutes. Someone in that 1,000 is twenty seconds faster in 5-6k than the average poster, after the average poster was forced to sprint the first 400.
This post was edited 2 minutes after it was posted.
I'm not so sure. Even in road races where you have a group of people who all do running as a hobby, isn't the average time for men something crazy like 34 minutes. I think the letsrunner would win (even if they had to sprint for the first 400m).
I don't think - on average - that someone in the 1000 would be able to beat the letsrunner but I suppose we will never know.
There's a film called the human race where the person in last dies until one remains, if I remember rightly.
Suppose that you and 1,000 people were placed at the west end of a long interstate highway. All traffic is cleared off the road, and at noon, everyone will start running or walking east.
You're given a 100 meter head start. If you can stay ahead of all of them until 11:59 AM the following day, you'll get $100 million. But if any of them pass you at any point before the 24 hours is up, you'll be shot dead.
The 1,000 people are selected at random from the U.S. population but will be the same age and gender as you. They're given the entire morning to coordinate a strategy and will each receive $1 million if any of them pass you. There's water at every mile, but everyone, including you, will have to carry their own food.
Suppose that you and 1,000 people were placed at the west end of a long interstate highway. All traffic is cleared off the road, and at noon, everyone will start running or walking east.
You're given a 100 meter head start. If you can stay ahead of all of them until 11:59 AM the following day, you'll get $100 million. But if any of them pass you at any point before the 24 hours is up, you'll be shot dead.
The 1,000 people are selected at random from the U.S. population but will be the same age and gender as you. They're given the entire morning to coordinate a strategy and will each receive $1 million if any of them pass you. There's water at every mile, but everyone, including you, will have to carry their own food.
Would you take the deal?
Yes
OMG!
Someone set up this race for Noyankee.
Please, please, please, someone make this happen. I beg of you!
In the end, you are betting to be better of 1000 random people your age on ALL races that last somewhere between 3 minutes and 24 hours. And you need to be better of them all at the same time and in succession (if a random guy better than you at a 24 h race shows up, he just needs to race at his 24 h race pace to beat you, he doesn't need to sprint 50" 400s or other crazy stuff). Very, very dumb bet. Maybe with a 10 km advantage and some experience of ultramarathon I could think of doing it (because I'm 32 years old with 2h32' marathon PR), otherwise it is just dumb.
+1
AND you are betting to be the better of 1,000 random people your age on ALL races...
AFTER you had to run crazy hard in the first few minutes, and then too hard for the next several minutes, and then far too fast for the first hour (relative to running for 24 hours total), and so on.
To put that another way, it is a 24 hour race (which most people have never done) and you are forced to make massive pacing errors consistently and immediately from the gun.
I posted earlier that if given an over/under, I would bet the average LetsRun poster would be caught within 20 minutes. Someone in that 1,000 is twenty seconds faster in 5-6k than the average poster, after the average poster was forced to sprint the first 400.
I think this scenario would be much more interesting if the time period was constrained to 4 hours at longest rather than 24 hours, and the head start was 200m instsad. An accomplished marathoner with a decent mid distance background in their youth should feel confident given that stipulation.
Maybe a more interesting question is whether 1000 random Letsrun posters could catch Bekele or something like that.
What about an average high school against Bekele?
You've got 1000 males, 3-4 sprinters who can run a 55" 400 or better, 3-4 distance guys who can run a 5:00 1600 or better, and maybe one guy that can do a low-mid 16 5K. Add in a few kids who may be able to run a half-decent marathon from sports like soccer, and Bekele might end up losing.