Dinner table argument: Say a relay on a track. You can have your guys running as short as 200 m each. Take the world best even. How many would you need to keep it up?
I said 50.
Dinner table argument: Say a relay on a track. You can have your guys running as short as 200 m each. Take the world best even. How many would you need to keep it up?
I said 50.
No fewer than 53.
allow me wrote:
No fewer than 53.
Preposterous! You could easily do it with 51.
I say as few as 36 if they were world class sub 4 minute milers. Have groups of 12 go at a time. 6 at each side of the track. They would only have to do a 200 at mile pace every 6 minutes. So 10X200m at mile pace spaced out over an hour, not too bad.
Have them rotate every hour or so. So 8 sets of 10X200m spread across an hour. 10 miles total at mile race pace but a lot of recovery.
Are said people in their prime? Or where they are at currently?
But all calculations aside, Jason Rexing did it on his own, so it doesn't really matter.
AND HE DID IT IN TRAINERS
4:00 for a full mile, or 1600?
Just kidding. This is a great question. I think the person who split it into 200s for his groups is pretty close, but even elite milers would have a hard time hitting 80 200s in <30s, regardless of how you break up the day. When that 12th or 24th hour rolls around, those 30s would be pretty damn hard.
Throw in about 10 more guys and the work load is decreased significantly.
Good question, but I have not answer.
This reminds me of the old 24-hour relay. What a great piece of madness that was.
http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?board=1&thread=555889&id=556209
30 guys would be enough.
Split them evenly into 2 groups, and have them run a lap each.
Group A will be running for three hours. One guy runs a lap, gets 14 minutes rest, and then runs another lap with 14 minutes of rest. The process repeats until three hours are up.
Group B then takes over for another three hours, repeating the same process as group A. Both groups will alternate until the 24 hours are over.
Could do it with 25. The secret? Have them get out hard - 57s per 400, say. THat way you'll have TIME IN THE BANK for when they get tired around 18 or 20 hours in.
You could do it with 20 high school 200/400m runners.
A 30 second 200m is nothing.
No Way wrote:
You could do it with 20 high school 200/400m runners.
A 30 second 200m is nothing.
With 20? That would mean at most they are getting 9:30s rest. And would be basically doing 6 30s 200 every hour. (Ie. one every 10 minutes). In 12 hours they would do 84 200s, that is 42 laps, which is 10.5 miles....
NOT A CHANCE. They could make it 8 hours and then they would start to miss.
Yep* wrote:
No Way wrote:You could do it with 20 high school 200/400m runners.
A 30 second 200m is nothing.
With 20? That would mean at most they are getting 9:30s rest. And would be basically doing 6 30s 200 every hour. (Ie. one every 10 minutes). In 12 hours they would do 84 200s, that is 42 laps, which is 10.5 miles....
NOT A CHANCE. They could make it 8 hours and then they would start to miss.
Not quite how I envisioned it.
I would split them up into groups of 5, have them do 5 sets with 2 minutes rest, let another group go, and rotate it that way. I'm not saying it would be easy, but the original question was what the minimum would be, and I think you could do it with 20 high school sprinters. Maybe 400/800m guys would be better, I don't know.
No Way wrote:
Yep* wrote:With 20? That would mean at most they are getting 9:30s rest. And would be basically doing 6 30s 200 every hour. (Ie. one every 10 minutes). In 12 hours they would do 84 200s, that is 42 laps, which is 10.5 miles....
NOT A CHANCE. They could make it 8 hours and then they would start to miss.
Not quite how I envisioned it.
I would split them up into groups of 5, have them do 5 sets with 2 minutes rest, let another group go, and rotate it that way. I'm not saying it would be easy, but the original question was what the minimum would be, and I think you could do it with 20 high school sprinters. Maybe 400/800m guys would be better, I don't know.
If you did it that way you would have 2 minutes rest and would cover a set in 12.5 minutes, that means they would then have 37.5 minutes between sets before you jumped in and did 5 more in 12.5 minutes. Not a chance they make it 8 hours. I just don't see any way a sprinter can do this, and KNOW that you will never find 20 high school sprinters that can do it.
It does not matter how you arrange the 20, the problem is they don't have the endurance, and no matter how slow they are going compared to their top speed they can not keep that up for long periods of time. I think you may be on tract with the 800 guys but its going to take high level athletes that have both speed AND endurance, significant endurance.
Its the same idea as the 30-40 work out just the rest is longer but the result will be the same. Sure to Bolt 30-40 second 200s are going to be a walk in the park, but after a mile of them, that walk in the park is really going to start to be a difficult run to keep up. Sure they have recovery under this scenario but the result will be the same.
24 guys should be enough for this - 12 sprinters and 12 milers.
Make the sprinters run hard - 25 seconds for every 200 meters. It'll come out to one 200 every five minutes per sprinter, and have them run for an hour. Total: 18 miles run.
Let them rest and have the milers take over for the next three hours. Have each miler run one lap at 1:04, so they should have almost 12 minutes of rest between laps. Total: 42 miles run in last 3 hours, 60 miles run since the first sprinter started running. Therefore, the 4:00/mile pace is still maintained.
The sprinters then start up again, and both groups rotate the same way until the 24 hours are over.
Well Geb + Bekele could last for quite a while by themselves.
Imagine if they had a full recovery and what not.
This is a Great question! Hell, it's great idea! Somebody should try to put it together.
I think that 50 sub 2 800 runners could do it: Put em in groups of 10 who do 200m legs for an hour- so every 5 hours the group would have to do 12x 200 in 30s with 4:30 recovery. Seems reasonable. The problem we haven't discussed yet is how hard it would be to assemble enough people who are fast enough to do this. My solution tries to account for this, but, still, while sub 2 is not blazing fast, finding 50 sub 2 guys is no mean feat in most parts of the country.
Awesome question. A lot of these predictions seem very ambitious. This would be 360 miles (~579 394m for anyone doing calculations), mind. 36 people = 10 miles each at 4:00 pace. 10 people = 36 miles
People like Geb, Bekele, Tadese, etc. could do an ungodly amount of distance at 4:00 pace. Certainly 40 quarters in 60. Make it a 300, max them out, and spread out the intervals, is it reasonable to say 100 reps? 30 000m? You find 20 people this fast and they only need 97 reps.
I don't know if you can find 20 people who can run 18.6 miles of 4:00 pace in a day, so maybe around 25.