ENOUGH of this crap about what is more difficult, 10,000 or 100m
If you do either of them to the best of your ability they are both equally difficult, and can both represent all-out efforts, just in different ways. The hallmark of this is that you cannot go out and immediately duplicate the performance--you must wait the prescribed period of time required for your energy systems to recover, whatever that time is.
In the 10,000m, after an all-out effort, it may take a week or two to recover. In a 100m, it may take 2 hours to recover--but to say that sprinting 60m flat-out is "hardly taxing" is absurd--it is, essentially, completely taxing, which is why a rest period is required thereafter, to re-charge, otherwise there is no possibility of duplicating the performance.
And when they do longer distances, sprinters are most definitely putting in more effort--first of all they weight more, a lot more--second of all, sprinting mechanics are much less efficient than are running mechanics, for anybody. If the same person runs 50m and sprints 50m in the same amount of time, they will burn vastly more calories during the sprint.
In fact, sprinting is so inefficient that one of the big theories is to conserve energy at the start so you have some left for the finish, because you can burn out even before 100m. Even trained sprinters have trouble sprinting 100m, which is why many adjust their mechanic to more of a running mechanic after 50 or 60m, with only a very few maintaining sprint form all the way through.
But to suggest that sprinting is somehow harder than distance running, when an all-out effort is produced, is ridiculous. Show me a person who believes that, and I will show you a person incapable of producing an all-out effort in distance running, for one reason or another. For me personally, I know that when I switch to 5k-type stuff in the winter, I can't produce an all-out effort for quite some time, and the same goes for when I switch to sprinting in the summer. I don't know exactly why, but it's a fact.
Of course there are more traumatic injuries in sprinting and more repetitive injuries in distance--no kidding.