Could a person impale themselves under their own power?

Based on a bit of TV I was watching. Here’s the scene.

It’s an abandoned warehouse. A man is stopped in an attempted rape by one of his previous victims hitting him with a pipe, knocking him out. She ties his hands behind his back. When he comes to shortly after, she forces him to drink a date rape drug-spiked drink. After a short while of tormenting him (and him trying to put her down) he falls unconscious. While she’s untying his prospective victim, we realise he’s faked sleeping, and he gets up and runs off (still with his hands tied behind him). She chases with the pipe. Lots of chasing. He runs into a dark (as in pitch black) room, and we hear a thud. She walks in, turns on the light - and he’s run onto a pole sticking diagonally up from the ground, impaling himself through the chest (quite considerably, a good portion of it is sticking out of his back).

Is this possible? It doesn’t seem plausible to me that you could impale yourself that badly just running into the pole - am I wrong or right?

( Sorry about the lengthy story, but I wanted to fit in all the factors I thought might have an effect (him running to stay out of jail, his hands tied behind him, drugged)

Plausability might depend on the shape of the pole, but I don’t have much trouble believing it’s possible. I think some of the “Most painful thing you’ve ever done to yourself” threads have had accounts of Dopers impaling hands or feet when they weren’t watching what they were doing. The weight of an adult running full tilt should be more than enough to drive a sharp pole right through them. Other than hitting a bone, what would stop it?

It seems a bit unlikely. It would depend on the diameter of the pole and what sort of end it had. It’s going to take a lot of force to push a pole through someone’s ribcage. It would be more believable if they were pierced below the ribcage, where it’s all soft tissue.

The pole was about flagpole-sized, and metal. Looked like copper, maybe? A pipe.

The Schwarzenegger film Commando ends with Arnie finishing off his rival by throwing a pipe (which looks about 4-5 inches across) through through the rival and into a steam boiler. This scene looks pretty implausible, what with the size and shape of the pipe, the fact that it’s thrown at a standing person, and that it goes straight through his ribs.

At the opposite end, there was a high school track and field accident near my home town back in the early 80’s where a student was practicing the javelin throw. The javelin stuck into the ground at an angle, and as he was going to pick it up, he slipped on the mud and fell forward, with the sharp point hitting him in the abdomen. Even without running, his body weight alone (combined with luck that it missed his spine and vital organs) was enough to push the point all the way through and out his back. He survived without any serious injury.

In this case, I vote unlikely. Cool visual, perhaps, but very unlikely.

Sorry, your post wasn’t there as I was writing my last post.