Horses can carry greater loads, including people, especially if you aren’t in a hurry?
I imagine many of us are couch potatoes and aren’t used to chasing down our food on foot, or walking long distances. But if you were raised in a society to hunt and track on foot, you could. I tested myself once and I could walk about 4 miles before tiring. That was over a period of a couple of hours. If I was bound and determined, I could probably cover three times that distance, if not more, in a day. While I’m young and in reasonably good shape, I’ve never run marathons or anything.
I don’t think people have to run to chase down the animals, either. We can just walk them to death. Humam walking isn’t that fast, but we can keep it up for hours and hours.
That’s an interesting one. If we did have a fixed allocation of heartbeats though, wouldn’t athletes, or anyone whose heartbeat is raised regularly, die earlier than average?
Athletes, by training their heart by regular workouts during which their heart is indeed beating faster, train it to beat slower at other times, at least if not more than cancelling the temporary heart racing of the training out.
Hmmm…you’d think people with meditative skills which enabled them to slow down their heartbeat would live longer than average then, wouldn’t you? Is there any truth to that?
Kwai Chang Caine walked everywhere, never rode.
Aye, but he only carried a flute.
As I understand it, the heartbeat thing is just an easy to measure indicator that we live much longer than other species do for our metabolic rate. In other words, most animals in a sense live about as long as each other; some just “live faster” than others. A tortoise in this sense just lives slower than a dog, not longer. Humans are an exception; we live something like 2-3 times what an animal of our metabolic rate “should”.
Didn’t you ever hear the one ‘bout the Runnin’ Cowboy?
A cite. Though the human value is closer to 2 billion.
And Scott Carrier is brother of David Carrier, mentioned in the Discover article.
So, based on that metric, the only thing that comes close to beating us in a long distance race is. . . the chicken. . . I never saw that one coming.
That’s based on average lifespan (70-some years for a human). The figures in the Asimov essay were based on the absolute outlier maximum lifespan for various species, or a hundred and something-teen for humans.
Can’t overestimate the utility of +4 flanking privilege. 
Yeah, plus you get guaranteed attacks of opportunity if it tries to run away.