The Buzz: Hitting the Human Wall

i-fc469bd52bc8361bb9c46b9ae9c06549-Usain Bolt.jpg

Human athletic performance has the consistent ability to amaze us--we tend to think of the Michael Phelpses and Lance Armstrongs of the world as nearly superhuman. But in fact, there are physiological limits to our species' strength and speed. On Starts With a Bang, Ethan Siegel calculates the fastest time theoretically possible for the mens' 100 meter dash, which Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt recently finished in a record 9.58 seconds at a championship race in Berlin. If men continue to increase their speed along the exponential path as mapped by Ethan, we can expect them to reach this limit around 2100--unless, as the graph also depicts, another statistical outlier like Usain Bolt comes along sooner. On Terra Sigillata, Abel Pharmboy also discusses the growing numbers of seniors taking part in running competitions, and how regular medication might affect their performance.

Tags

More like this

"A lot of legends, a lot of people, have come before me. But this is my time." -Usain Bolt
Those of you who've been reading Starts With A Bang since this last summer may have seen this article I wrote -- The Math of the Fastest Human Alive -- about Usain Bolt's world record in the 100 meter
Last year, while watching the Beijing Olympics, I was blown away by how much faster Usain Bolt was than everybody else:
Hrmph. The real issue is the exact proper motion, not the dispersion about the mean. Although I suppose outliers can be interesting, even in small N groups. This is very clever. I award it a clear: "damn, I wish I had thought of that...!"