Obviously kipping pull-ups show a person's best overall athletic ability.
Obviously kipping pull-ups show a person's best overall athletic ability.
best overall ability for a distance runner? Somewhere between a 5K and a half marathon. I'd say 8K or 10K. The marathoners/halfers go down while the mid distance guys go up.
600m
The whole bit about shorter distance runners being too exhausted after Kipsang catches them is irrelevant. They wouldn't be running away in the first place.
The best 600m runner can catch anyone.
If you're talking about which running event requires the most "athleticism" - it would probably be the 400 hurdles. Combination of sprint and distance (the two main categories) with a huge agility piece thrown in.
If you mean for "running greatness", it's either the 100 meter or the marathon, since they're the fastest and the longest races. (Not the 60.)
And if you mean for "mid-distance greatness" (as it sounds like you do) then yeah, the 1500 is a good mix of distance and sprinting. More so than the 800, which is a long sprint. Even though the 800 would also be a candidate for the most athletic event.
The answer is all of them except race walking.
Who could win one Olympic sprint/mid/distance event and place best in all the others? Obviously a 5k runner or a strength based 1500m runner.
The 800 is not a long sprint, it is a short middle distance.
Another vote for the 600m like somebody else suggested.
Brutal, brutal distance. It's right at the transition.
While the 100 and marathon are obviously at the extremes, and the specialists would be terrible at other things, sometimes a person's "overall ability" is akin to greatness, and those events could be considered the most important ones.
But obviously, if all track athletes raced at the median or average distance, the middle distance guys would be able to win or do the best considering. Most likely the 800 guys would do the best in the 800 and down, 1500 could go upwards.
The whole question is dumb though, because at whatever distance you choose, the specialists will be the best at it. If you want to label one race or another as showing the best "overall ability" then it's just arbitrary - based on what criteria you consider.
I'd say have everyone run every distance and score it like a track meet. I think the 1500m runner would run - equal races over and under both distances (1/2/4/8 compared to 15/5/10/marathon) but the distances increase so much that it would give a huge advantage to the miler across all of them.
This is the most idiotic question I have ever read. I'm just in awe.
4K XC BABY!!! where the men & boys are separated.
You Are What You Is wrote:
This is the most idiotic question I have ever read. I'm just in awe.
Was this your typical response on school tests?
for me personally, to simply judge a runner's ability, i like to see them in an open 400. that is enough for me to know their capacities. it doesn't matter if they are best at the 100 or the marathon, this distance will tell me who they are.
Well you want to take this into consideration, if we're trying to find a median, then you need to think about where the fast twitch guys (sprinters), when are they going to level off? What is their threshold? and when would the slow twitch (endurance based) runner catch up and cross paths? Don't think about a track, just tell both these types of runners to go in a straigt line down a road... well of course the sprinter would get out faster, but the second will eventually be made up by the distance runner cause he's got more endurance, but at what distance would that be?
By this logic I'm going to say the 600m, the sprinter can run a faster 400m, but he can only hang on for so long, and it doesnt take that much to fade after 400m when youre going all out
Now, physiologically, the 800m is 50% aerobic, 50% anaerobic, and it shows true strength while having to focus on maintaining a fast pace, so physiologically this shows who has the equal best fitness in terms of endurance and speed
So heck, ill go in the middle of 600 and 800 and just say 700m!!!
Bad Wigins wrote:The warrior's distance is 800 meters. You can run fast but still be big and powerful wielding a spear or axe...blah...blah...
i tried a theoretical approach, using those "mathematical" tables i devised, first with 800 -> 10k & then 400 -> 10k :
the line of equivalence is
44.00 = 1'42.00 = 3'28.25 = 7'22.11 = 12'41.75 = 26'20.07
i haven't time to do the calculations until later today & you might have time :
1) put in 800 -> 10k as a speed/distance curve( x = distance, y = speed ), look for best polynomial fit ( my software gave a cubic, maybe you get a x^4 ), take 2nd differential, meaning rate of change of acceleration, make it equal 0 & see what the x value is for the supposed inflexion point
2) repeat for 400 -> 10k & get a polynomial with x^4 or x^5 depending on your software, again take 2nd differential, make it = 0 & see what x is
you like maths
try it & see if we get any "useful" values for x...
you of course will get better fits withs power/exponential/log curves but i'm not spending a week trying to take 2nd differential of those & solve for y'' = 0
if your software will do it, there will be "better" answers for x
mako wrote:
I think something like the following is humanly possible and would show the best overall running ability:
100m - 11.00
400m - 47.00
800m - 1:42.00
1500m - 3:29.00
5000m - 13:10
10 000m - 27:30
Star wrote:
That's pretty close to Said Aouita's PRs.
1:43.86
3:29.46
12:58.39
27:26.11
11 flat and 47 flat were surely in his realm.
He held the 1500 m world record for 7 years.
They surely were not. Especially not 11 flat from blocks.
Only guy with a prayer of all those times was probably Seb Coe.
Captain Oblivious. wrote:
600m
The whole bit about shorter distance runners being too exhausted after Kipsang catches them is irrelevant. They wouldn't be running away in the first place.
The best 600m runner can catch anyone.
Exactly. The responses so far are way too distance-biased. The mile is a distance event in the grand scheme of things.
If you consider the 100m runners and the marathon runners to be the two extremes, 600 meters is about where they'd meet in the middle.
mako wrote:
When Kipsang eventually catches Juantorena then Juantorena is harmless at that point, too exhausted. That's the point of persistence hunting.
Dan Lieberman claims that the original hunter-gatherers were more like today distance runners. The more robust types emerged with farming as you need some absolute power as a farmer in contrast to being a persistence hunter.
My own not-so-distant ancestors were persistence hunters, as were yours if you are Nordic. It's not fast. In the north it was done slogging on skis in deep snow, which over time required more effort from the prey than the hunter. Sometimes hunters would tag-team a wolf or a bear from day to day until it dropped. Native Americans persistence hunted on snowshoes. In southern midday hunting the prey is felled by overheating, not excess effort.
Juantorena is not an animal and would realize Kipsang's strategy and stop running, then pummel him when he caught up. Juantorena was probably the most formidable runner in history.
ventolin^3 wrote:
the line of equivalence is
44.00 = 1'42.00 = 3'28.25 = 7'22.11 = 12'41.75 = 26'20.07
i haven't time to do the calculations until later today & you might have time :
1) put in 800 -> 10k as a speed/distance curve( x = distance, y = speed ), look for best polynomial fit ( my software gave a cubic, maybe you get a x^4 ), take 2nd differential, meaning rate of change of acceleration, make it equal 0 & see what the x value is for the supposed inflexion point
No need for polynomials. Just going by men's WR's and average speed:
50m/5.56s = 8.99m/s
100/9.58 = 10.4m/s
200/19.19 = 10.4m/s
400/43.18 = 9.26m/s
800/100.91 = 7.93m/s
1609.3/223.13 = 7.21 m/s
3218/478.61 = 6.72m/s
5000/757 = 6.60
10000/1576 = 6.34
Considered linearly over distance, the greatest average per-meter drop in velocity occurs between 200 and 400 meters, -1.14 m/s over 200m. Then the decrease in velocity starts to slow to -1.33m/s over 400m (-.66m/s per 200), -.72m/s over 809.3m (-.18m/s per 200), to finally only -.26m/s over 5000m (-.017 seconds per 200)
This shows that dy/dx is concave down from 50m to somewhere between 200 and 400, and concave up thereafter to 10000m. The inflection point of speed over distance is somewhere between 200 and 400m.
On the other hand, the graph of y over 100x^2 for x in [-1,inf) is clearly concave down until an inflection point somewhere between 400 and 800m, and concave up thereafter. That's roughly where the greatest drop in speed occurs when you double distance, and is around the point where glycolysis is maxed out and oxidation becomes the primary energy source.
I don't see any significance in either of those inflection points other than that the second one is useful guff in support of the 600 meters faction, which is basically the same as the 800 meters faction which makes them my allies. And of course El Caballo could have run a mean 600 meters though I don't know if he ever did.
Bad Wigins wrote:
This shows that dy/dx is concave down
y is concave down, that is; dy/dx is decreasing. Typo.
Bad Wigins wrote:
The warrior's distance is 800 meters. You can run fast but still be big and powerful wielding a spear or axe.
An 800 runner can easily outrun any sprinter with only a few seconds head start, and outrun any distance runner who doesn't have a much bigger head start. Juantorena would only need 2 seconds to stay ahead of Usain Bolt for good. But Wilson Kipsang would need probably about 15 seconds to escape from Juantorena.
The important role of running in battle is to pursue or escape. Nobody charges into battle except in the movies, they move slowly and organized. But when the enemy is defeated, then it is time for the enemy to run, and 800 meters is the critical distance. The victor will not pursue farther than that because it disrupts his line and makes it vulnerable to counterattack. So the 800 runners in the defeated army will escape, and the 800 runners in the winning army will kill or capture the most fleeing enemies.
It is true that a distance runner could eventually run down an 800 runner, but then what? When Wilson Kipsang catches Juantorena, El Caballo will just beat him up. Overall ability involves weighing more than a woman.
lol, great post!