How long, in what circumstances, with what preparation if any?
I’m not sure how else to qualify my question except to say that if you think you have something interesting to add that’s related to the topic, feel free.
The fastest marathon run took 2:02:57. So the best 60 consecutive minutes in that run is probably over 13 miles. It could be the record but there may be an event with a record time closer to 1 hour that beats that.
Well, fastest half marathon is 58:18, so we can make a guess at least if what is possible, there.
Eddie Izzard ran 27 marathons in 27 days, which means 707 miles a month. And he’s just a middle-aged comedian - I’m sure actual athletes have done much better.
The record for walking/running across America is 3067 miles in 42 days, which means there must be a 30 day stretch in which they did over 2190 miles.
The male world record for a 24-hour run is 303.506 km (188.590 miles) and was set by Yiannis Kouros and Mami Kudo holds the female record of 252.205 km (162.919 miles)
Dean Karnazes has completed a number of endurance events, mostly running events, but also a swimming event. He ran 350 miles (560 km) in 80 hours and 44 minutes without sleep in 2005. ( about half a week)
A one 1:00:00 half marathon can’t do more than 13 miles and some change, that could be the winner since no one hit the 2:00:00 for a full marathon, but the full marathon runner might get further than that in the fastest one hour out of the whole race. It doesn’t have to be the fastest full marathon either. They do keep intermediate times for marathons so it’s possible to find the fastest one hour recorded.
If there is an event of longest distance covered in 1 hour you’d probably get the winner when someone goes that full hour with nothing left to spare. That half marathon in 58 minutes has to be damn close to that.
21.285 Kilometers, 13.226 miles. in 1 hour. If Wikipedia is to be believed. It does not seem to be an event that gets a lot of attention so I am sure there is room for improvement.
There is historical evidence that ordinary humans of all shapes and sizes can walk 30 miles in a single day, then get up the next day and do it again. What’s amazing about Eddie’s adventure is that he jogged most of it instead of just walking, and the fact that he did it after living decades of a sedentary lifestyle on a junk food diet. Go back in time at least 100 years, randomly select 100 people over the age of 12, and I’ll wager that 95 out of that 100 could beat Eddie’s achievement. The “marathon” seems daunting to us mainly because we live in a world where running half a mile to catch a bus seems like a huge effort. If memory serves, the modern “marathon” is based on a story about a soldier who ran ~40km (presumably taking a lot longer than 2 hours, probably more like 4 or 5 hours), then fought in a battle, then ran ~40km back to deliver the news, all in the same day. Find me someone who can do that 27 times in 27 days and I will be really really impressed. Leave out the battle-fighting part and I’m confident that there are millions of athletes alive today who could walk/jog/run 80km per day for 30 days, which is really close to 1,500 miles.
This also gives us an upper bound that none of them could complete 3,067 miles in only 30 days or else they would have beaten the record (by 12 days). So the one-month max is likely somewhere between 2,400 and 2,800 miles.
Of course, 3067 miles across the USA probably isn’t the easiest possible place to try to set a record. Going up and over the Rocky Mountains has to slow you down a bit. There might be someone who has done >3,000 miles in 30 days on a flat course.
How does such long distance running tend to differ from ordinary running in terms of gait or ways in which it’s done? I remember some Australian shepherd who won a long distance run by doing a kind of lower leg shuffle.
How does the body of long distance runners tend to change? Any idea how their brain changes?
Is the idea of “The Thousand Mile Month” something that’s out there? It sounds challenging enough and has a nice ring to it while being possible for most healthy, non-elderly people if they commit to it.
At ultra-ultra-long distances, you get the best distance by walking and then just never stopping. For instance the record that I linked to, I’m not sure if they jogged at all, but they could have done the 70 miles a day by walking at a 3.5 mph pace for 20 hours a day, or slightly faster with more sleep (but still not much more than 4 mph).
In 50-100 mile races, I have seen people run using a pace somewhat in between a regular jog and a stereotypical effeminate mince - i.e. a lot of extended, relatively slow arm swinging, and the legs have a long arc but do not lift off the ground very much. I’m not sure if all the competitive racers use this pace, or I only noticed it because it stuck out. (I am not a competitive ultra runner, but one of the races I was in had a 25 mile out-and-back trail which you did multiple laps of depending on the distance you were trying to run, so I got the opportunity to see the front runners multiple times, not just when they passed me some time after the 2 mile mark.)
No thread on long distance running is complete without a reference to Cliff Young. Won a 544 mile race in 5 days, 15 hrs, 05 minutes … at the age of 61 … as a complete novice. Few racers in later runnings of that event beat his time.
That’s average of almost 78 miles a day. A younger runner could probably keep up at least an 80 miles/day pace for at least a week. Not sure about a month.
Young’s famous “shuffle” pace seems to be ideal for long distance running.
Fun fact: he tried to do the 16k km “around Australia” run and quit after 6.5k km … because one of his crew members was ill. Not sure how long he had been running when he stopped. He was 76 at the time.
That could be reaching the limits of human ability right now. We see that it’s about what a half marathoner does in just under an hour, and the best 60 minutes in a marathon probably isn’t much different. I imagine all three sports will keep progressing for a while so when I say human limits I expect the distances and times to improve, but by smaller and smaller amounts.
I’m of two minds when it comes to whether races with pace runners (to break wind for you) should really “count” or not. Other runners in the same marathon – probably. A motorcycle, or a relay of sprinters? Maybe not.
Generally you start at short distances and move up to longer distances as you get older. Because you’ve got better endurance when old.
Not a shepherd – a sheep farmer. And although he had minimal background in professional racing, he apparently used to run around the farm. He said his sheep dogs would loose interest because they couldn’t keep up.
Worth mentioning, the *Rarámuri*tribe from Mexico; long distance running is part of their culture. They have won ultramarathon events…while wearing sandals made from recycled tire treads.
Off topic, but I recently read about Amanda Coker, who rode nearly 140,000 km in a year.
Hmm. I once walked from Queens Quay and Bay Street (near the waterfront in Toronto) to Islington Subway Station (where I could catch a City of Mississauga bus I had tickets for) in about 4.5 hours, IIRC. (All because I accidentally spent my subway fare and it was the day before payday and I had NO other resources.) Google Maps gives a distance of 13.6 km and a walking time of just under 3 hours. I do remember stopping a few times, and I had enough for a small chocolate milk near High Park… but not a subway fare… so clearly I was not the most efficient traveller. But with a bit of rest here and there I could certainly have continued.
13.6 km in 4.5 hours is 3 km/h, or 1.9 mph. At that speed, to go 30 miles would take less than 16 hours. So that’s a worst case, unprepared, out-of-shape person covering the distance in well under a day.
Sounds like even walking, Toronto traffic is awful. Still, that’s faster than driving some days.
I think this requires assuming that their speed is constant. Which is probably close to correct, but maybe not quite?
Mathematically (by the pigeonhole principle), there only must be a 30-day stretch where they do 1533.5 miles. Obviously, that’s undercounting in terms of what real human performance would be, which is probably very close to the “constant speed” calculation.