Running barefoot? 18 hours a day? And Native Americans outrunning horses?

Factual Questions
21

Thank you very much The_Llama! What you say makes a lot of sense and sounds quite reasonable. I’d like to ask something. I agree that running on roads is an unnecessary danger due to glass, but is it possible for the average to train barefoot on roads/pavement without having long-term impact on your bones?

I also would like to ask, if Kenyans run 20 miles a day, what do they eat down there in Kenya? The metabolic requirements would seem to be exceedingly high for a continent that’s supposedly starving… unless Caucasians happen have an extremely inefficient metabolism…

22

Does anyone have a better source for olympic running records than this? This page does show a good number of record holders in long distance running to be from African countries - particularly men - although these countries don’t quite absolutely dominate the categories…

23

I’m not sure exactly what you mean by this. To be honest, I abandoned barefoot running when my training got really serious, because to travel to a grassy field just to add another mile or so per day was really inconvenient. (I was already doing 60- 80 miles per week) So I can’t vouch personally for what it did to my bones long term. However, ALL of my track workouts were in racing flats which offer basically no support whatsoever and only put a thin layer of rubber between you and the track. I also race 5,000 and 10,000 meters (as well as all other distances) in racing flats, and I’ve never had a bone injury. If you run on the balls of your feet properly, and naturally, then you can minimize impact dramatically. My coach always told me that you were running properly when you couldn’t hear your feet hitting the ground. Anyway, to answer what I think is your question, I don’t think that long term toe running, barefoot or otherwise, will cause you more bone damage then heel-toe running in shoes will. In fact, it should cause less. But as I said, barefoot running on pavement is dangerous and it would take a lot of discipline and pain to get your feet calloused enough to be able to stand it.
As a quick example, my feet are fairly tough. One day some idiot was giving me a hard time about racing him at 100m. I only had trainers on, and no flats available, so I did it in my socks on a track. Long story short, I rubbed the skin off of both my feet at the point of impact on the balls of my feet. Running for the next week (in shoes) hurt quite a bit. My point is, your first day out you’re gonna rip up your feet pretty bad. Then you have to go do it again. And again, etc. You leave yourself open to infection, and injury from glass as mentioned. The moral is, barefoot running is a great addition to your workout, but I wouldn’t personally suggest making it your total training regiment.

I honestly don’t remember what the diet was, but the guys at the Training Camp ate quite a lot. What the average person ate, I don’t know. But don’t forget, the reason that a nation like Kenya would have a lot of world class runners is because everyone runs. As a result, you have the entire country as a pool to pull from, as opposed to here where in a lot of schools cross country isn’t as cool as football, so you don’t know if maybe we lose a lot of talented runners to other sports or to just sitting around playing video games. (The point being that those that can run, and survive a meager diet, will go on to compete… survival of the fittest, if you will).
Man, one day I’ll have a short post.

24

Some Track Records

You’ll see that Africans dominate above 1000 meters. Americans have almost always been the sprinters to beat. (Donovan Bailey doesn’t count). Totally different running. But El Guerrouj and Gebrselassie are freaking unbelievable.

Oddly enough, the women’s side isn’t the same. I don’t know enough about the social structure over there to know if women just don’t get to go to school, or they don’t get to do the same things as men, so I have no idea why there’s such a drastic difference.

25

So long as you consider 300km in 24 hours not pushing them too hard then you are correct. Because that’s what horses are capable of.

A horse can run for much longer than 4 hours. I don’t know what gave you the idea that the maximum time a horse can carry a rider for is 4 hours but it’s not even close to true.

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it’s simply easier to ride one long distances than walk/run it yourself, although you’d get there faster if you did.
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It would have to be a teribly long distnace for even a superfit person to get there faster than ahorse. I’m guessing 1000 kilometres or more would be required.
I think a lot of people in this thread would benefit from a previous thread which debunked the myth that humans can run faster than horses over distance.

If humans can ever outdistance a horse there is no evidence for it happening. Over all recorded distances the horse times are considerably faster than humans. I don’t doubt that a fit human could run down a horse because of the stress factor and because humans are better bale to make use of the landscape. However there is no reason to believe that humans can run for longer or travel faster than a man on horseback. That is simply a myth.

26

I was skeptical that humans would be physically superlative to animals in anything. For one thing, if we really were made to run 18 hours a day, the metabolic requirements must be enormous. For another thing, the carbohydrate requirements for such streneous exercise must be enormous, beyond what meat can provide (unless Atkins is right and ketosis is our default metabolic state, but I doubt it).

Oh, well, looks like it’d be an interesting project to research prehistoric lifestyles one of those days.

I’ll accept The_Llama’s answer when it comes to barefooted animals, and I’ll accept your answer when it comes to humans outrunning animals, and I’ll accept that there are some tribes who run a lot. Thanks.

27

Sorry, meant to clarify–if we could really find and eat 6,000 calories of carbohydrates that we’d probably require to run 18 hours a day, there’d be no need to hunt or run (just look at us Americans for a cite). But IANA nutritionist… so what do I know…

28

dre2xl It’s not quite that simple.
There is very little doubt that humans have evolved to run great distances. That much is evidenced by the fact that all HGs and most primitive agriculturalists do run great distances. We are very good at running long distances and only handful of mammals can beat us. We are almost certainly within the to 10 fastest living mammals species over distance.

Sure the metabolic requirements for a running human are high, but no higher relative to body mass than they are for any other mammals species, and much less than for the majority.

Carbohydrates aren’t a good energy source compared to fats. And whereas plants don’t have much fat animals do. The energy return on even a prolonged hunt is much higher than the energy return on the same amount of time spent gathering vegetable matter simply because the energy in an animal body is so high. Animals are also a good source of protein, far better than plants and in the diet of other primates protein tends to be the limiting nutrient. So even if there is no net energy return on a hunt the protein return alone make sit worth it.

Nobody is suggesting that humans ever ran 18 hours a day every day. Such feat would have been infrequent, probably less than once a fortnight for any tribe and so probably less than once every 2 months for any individual male.

Your final clarification makes no sense to me. Those 6000 calories are obtained because of the hunt. They aren’t obtained in order to hunt. To think of it another way gathering food probably requires 100 calories a day for 7 days to obtain the same amount of energy as one hunt returns. But you can’t just conclude that if people could find the 7000 calories needed they wouldn’t need to gather. People need to get food from somewhere. So long as the return is greater than the energy expenditure we will d it in preference to starving to death. Obviously a whole horse carcase will return a lot more than 6000 calories.

29

Blake,

It was my friend who was claiming that we were made to run 18 hours a day, not any Doper specifically.

I made a distinction between carbohydrates and calories. AFAIK running requires the expenditure of many carbohydrates. Hunting provides nearly no carbohydrates. If you could gather enough carbs to run 18 hours a day, you wouldn’t need to hunt in teh first place. Unless–could Atkins be right after all, and our default metabolic state is ketosis, and that we were meant to eat a diet of 8000 calories in meat and 500 in fruit/veggies?

But, it’s quite obvious that I’m speaking out of my ass, and I’ll actually educate myself on prehistoric diet and prehistoric lifestyles. (I’ve got a feeling that everyone speaks out of their ass on this subject a little, though, considering all the conflicting information out there on the ratios of carbs/fat/protein of what man “originally” ate, from PETA to FDA to Atkins.)

30

dre2xl distance running doesn’t require the expenditure of many carbohydrates AFAIK. There is an initial glycogen use but after that the energy supply comes mainly from fat.

Even if that weren’t the case I still don’t understand your point. Just because you can gather enoigh carbohydrates to run for 18 hours that doens’t mean you don’t need to hunt ever agin. Those carbohydrates will run out and you will then need to gather more food or starve to death. One good way to do that is to go and kill something. It doesn’t require ketosis or anything else. It just requires that people need to eat or they wll starve to death, and a person with a freshly killed horse carcasse can never stave to death.

What the first people ate is rather inconsequential. One thing is certain, and that is that they ate whatever food was available raher than starving to death. If horses were available they ate horses. An dthey did that because horses contain a huge number of calories. Far more than the few thousand neede to run one down.

31

Actually, a horse can only RUN for a couple of miles before it has to stop. A horse can trot for hours, but a trot isn’t all that much faster than a human’s jogging pace.

And a wild horse isn’t being fed concentrated, energy-rich grain supplements; it’s eating low-quality grasses, and has to spend most of its day grazing in order to meet its energy requirements. Running down a horse succedes in part because the animal is being denied the chance to graze (and drink; a horse working in hot weather sweats like crazy); the resulting glycogen depletion and electrolyte imbalances are what forces the animal to a stop.

32

Strange, after reading that whole thread I don’t see any debunking going on…

I think this is a case of you reading what you want out of it.

33

That’ s just not true. Horses can’t run at all. They have four basic gaits to choose from and none of them called a run. A trot is a run insofar as there is a period in which no legs are in contact with the Earth. A trot is a run by any defintion and as you say they can sustain it for much more than 4 hours.

And as for a trot not being much faster than jogging pace I calls bullshit on that as well.

“The medium trot speed is about 4 meters per second, 240 meters per minute, about 1 km in four minutes, 15 km in one hour, hence twice the speed of walk. Well-conditioned carriage horses reach 375 m per minute and well-trained trotting horses do the mile well below two minutes.” Compare that to a very fast human jog of 19km/hr & a moderate human jog of 10km/hr. IOW a very fast horse will trot at 48km/hr and a moderate horse will trot at 15km/hr compared to a very fast human jogging at 19km/hr and a moderate human at 10km/hr.

I would say that between 2.5 and 1.5X times faster is much faster. If human athletes started recording speeds over twice as fast we’d say they were running much faster.
www.horsemanpro.com/articles/trot.htm
http://www.brianmac.demon.co.uk/energyexp.htm
http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~jimella/athletic.htm

Honestly artemis, if you think that a horse can’t travel much faster than a human over distance then how do you account for the much faster times that horses record over all distances? Do you think they were flying?

Yep. Or as I said above “I don’t doubt that a fit human could run down a horse because of the stress factor and because humans are better able to make use of the landscape. “

I never had a problem with people running down horses. I had a problem with you assertion that horses can only run for 4 hours and can’t be pushed too hard. I also have a problem with your idea that only a horse trotting at speeds comparable to a human jog can travel for more than a few hours. Horses carrying riders on their backs cover 250km or more in 24 hours over rough terrain. Either those horses are travelling much faster than any human can jog or they are teleporting to the finish line.

34

Endurance racing with horses generally cover about 100 miles in a day. A man can travel this distance in about 16-18 hours. Longer distance races are covered in several days: http://www.endurance.net/WhatIs/

I agree that horses can give a man a run for his money, but the statements made in the other thread are hardly conclusive “debunking” as you claim.

As for the horses traveling faster: I agree, I think the record for a horse is 38 miles per hour, though that is only on a mile and quarter track. Nothing that could be kept up for much more distance. A human generally only runs about 5-6 miles per hour, though I suppose there will be exceptions. The real question is can a horse keep up a constant pace for prolonged periods. How far can a horse run at 14mph before he must stop and rest?

35

To quote this for those that don’t like to open pdf files, I quote these passages in regards to document cases of human endurance:

Bolding mine. And:

Again, bolding mine.

Now, do you think a horse can run for two days straight? Or for 170 miles without stopping?

36

Epimetheus did you read the link to the previous thread above?

There is no distance at all which a human has travelled faster than a horse. Whether it is done non-stop or in staggered legs humans have never travelled any distance faster than a horse. The idea that a human is faster than a horse over any distance is well and truly debunked. Now what evidence do you have that a human has ever or could outdistance a horse? That perticular myth has been well and truly debunked because average horses have covered every possible distance faster than the very best humans.

<I>The real question is can a horse keep up a constant pace for prolonged periods. How far can a horse run at 14mph before he must stop and rest?</I>

That isn’t realy the question. If a horse can travel the distance faster than the human even with stops then the horse will obviously never get caught. If a horse gets a 20km lead on the human in the first 6 hours then goes to sleep for three hours and then starts running again he will still never get caught despite not being able to keeep up the pace.

Lets imagine all time world champion Yannis Kouros and a fairly average horse racing from a dead start. At the end of 24 hours the unladen horse will be a long way on front of him no matter what tactics it employed during the race. There is no way that the fastest man in the owlrd can travel any distance at all faster than anaverag horse.

The real question is not whether a horse keep up a constant pace for prolonged periods. It is whether a horse can keep out of spear range of a pursuing human by any combimation of paces at all. And with the horses staying over 10kms ahead I’d say the answer is a conclusive ‘Yes’.

37

:rolleyes:

You keep going on with this faster thing. Nobody is saying a human is faster. They are saying a human can OUTRUN a horse by wearing the horse down. They can LAST longer than a horse.

Why don’t you debunk the link I gave, since your claims about them being so debunked are being tossed about so freely.

38

Have you read any of the stuff above?

Sure there is, I travel over 70mph per hour every day. If you want to take things out of context I sure can too.

Well, I just gave some buddy. And bolded them. I linked to a site about ENDURANCE horse racing, saying the most they race the horses in a day is 100 miles. And then showed you a DOCUMENTED case- from a cite with strong references, of humans that ran over 170 miles without stopping. What evidence can you offer showing that horses can last longer than that?

Bullcrap, That really is the question. A horse isn’t going to keep running from a person for 6 hours. They will run out of sight, and then stop, until they see the humans again, humans which have been TRACKING the horse.

Yes there is. A horse will only travel at a slow pace compared to their maximum, as will a human. Yannis is a speed record breaker, not an endurance record breaker. This is entirely about endurance, not speed. Now, if you can show some cites, or math or something showing that a horse traveling at 14mph hour will always stay ahead of a man running 6 mph, if the horse needs to stop and rest every few hours. And lets not kid ourselves. In a race with a time limit, such as 24 hours, the horse is probably going to win. Lets take this how it is supposed to be- two days straight. Now, lets see that horse run for two days without stopping. Not going to happen. So yes, it is relevant. When that horse stops to sleep, the humans will catch up.

I think I have conclusively debunked your claim that a horse can stay out of spear range.
You have debunked nothing, just repeated the same tired old statement about something else being debunked. This isn’t a case of speed, it is a case of ENDURANCE. Now, read this slowly, I will repeat it since you are having such trouble grasping it. It…is…A…case…of…endurance…NOT…outright…speed.

In fact, if you actually bothered to read my posts above, you would have seen that I even stated that I read them.

You are starting to sound like Lekatt, Blake.

39

I disagree that there is a difference in the women’s game. Tegla Loroupe of Kenya holds the 20k, hour, 25k and 30k records. It’s true that Paula Radcliffe (as a Brit, one of my personal heroes), arguably the current greatest distance runner, holds the marathon and 20k off-track records, but she’s trained in Africa for years and the woman is obsessed with running, to the extent of bathing every night in ice.

The 3k, 5k and 10k women’s records should not be viewed as genuine. THey are from an era in which Chinese athletes were routined taking performance-enhancing drugs. They will probably never be beaten (although Paula Radcliffe got close to the 10k a few years ago).

But all these records hide the true state of the women’s game. The fact is that by far and away the most successful nations in women’s distance running are African. Athletes like Loroupe, Tulu Deratu, Adere Berhane, Kidane Werknesh, Dibaba Tirunesh, Gete Wami and Masai Edith dominate the 5k, 10k and 20k events. The only others who really get a look in are Dominguez and Radcliffe.

40

Re. African runners’ diets, it is not true (as someone said earlier) that the “whole continent” of Africa is starving, and anyway, many of the top African runners live and train in the US or elsewhere for much of the year. I, too, would like to learn more about what they eat. Although many of the fastest distance runners are African, unfortunately they are rarely interviewed or featured in Runners’ World (hardly ever see any non-white runners - even Americans - in that mag, for some reason).

On a completely different note, there’s a guy here who runs respectable marathon times backwards. I see him all over town, running backwards. One would think he’d have at least strange-looking musculature, but he has an outstanding physique.