Re: about asthma, evolution and sports

In article <slrneatasp.flp.lamoran@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Larry Moran <lamoran@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, 07 Jul 2006 19:16:13 -0000,
Robert Grumbine <bobg@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <slrneat662.f80.lamoran@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Larry Moran <lamoran@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 7 Jul 2006 08:08:03 -0700, Kermit <unrestrained_hand@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[snip]

Make it 3 mph, 100 miles, and the humans and dogs win.

Amazing. I don't know many humans who could walk 100 miles in 33 hours.
You must have different friends than me!

Of course I do. Some run 100 mile races up and down the Rockies
for amusement.

Horses lose to humans at that distance. 50 miles is a little dicier as
random Torontonians are not in as good a shape for their species
as random horses are for theirs. Depending on which breed of dog,
humans will win over the dogs. (Probably not wolves.)

How do you know this?

Experience and the Noakes cite.

Your list is a bit of stacking the deck, of course. All the
best non-human endurance are on your list, but you fail to list
some thousands of land animals which are greatly inferior to
humans as endurance athletes (tack up the amphibians and reptiles,
for instance).

Of course I'm stacking the deck. I'm trying to make a point. The vaunted
superiority of humans at long distance running seems to be a myth.

I dunno. Being plausible contenders to beat > 90% of land animals
(species) at something is a fair sort of superiority.

Perhaps we're good at it but nowhere near the top of the heap as far as
I can see.

Further stacking, of course, by equating a species in which
current exemplars are no longer selected for their endurance ability
and pitting against those which have not lost that selection.

Now that's not fair. You have no way of knowing whether our ancestors
were any better at it than us. I know it's quite popular to imagine that
all humans looked and behaved like an Olympic athlete but I doubt
whether that's an accurate picture.

More or less well trained, but not especially selected humans have
been able to do 10-20 miles per day as a matter of routine for as
long as we've got any indicators on endurance. The Marathon run was
not especially long for a trained courier of that day, nor is it
today. The longer run done the day before was ca. 100 miles, which
is still a reasonable distance. (Friends have done it, including
over mountain ranges.)

Back then, as today, if someone had need of covering that sort of
distance, they could and did. Today it's just less common to choose
(need) to do it.

If you get to pick the best-trained human athletes then I get to pick
animals that have been training for several years as well.

Nope. I'm not picking elite humans. Nor even best trained humans.
Just humans who have some endurance experience to make the distance.
You're absolutely free to train your horses to the peak of horsely
endurance. You'll lose. The Western States 100 miler started
as a horse race. The horses kept dying and racers had to walk out.
The race then shifted to humans only, start to finish, and the
times got much faster (and the number of deaths plummeted). Western
States is a relatively easy 100 miler, and the winning times are in
the range of 15 hours. A friend runs the more difficult Vermont 100
miler in ca. 20 hours and doesn't even place.

Random, but _trained_, humans (and we'd be trained if we still had
need of the ability) are still among the outstanding endurance
athletes on land, in spite of the fact that there's no purpose
served by the ability any more. If you let the humans get in
to shape first, set the criterion at 5 mph and 50 miles and
put your money on:
Pronghorn Antelope
Wolves
Humans
critter flambee
.. in this order. You'll lose none of the Pronghorn, some
of the wolves, something like half the humans, and all or nearly
all the rest. Humans run down horses in the long haul. We
also do 50 and 100 mile races for amusement, not even requiring
walls of flamethrowers to start the race. (Mass lobotomy rays
don't hurt, however.)

No sane human does 100 mile races for amusement. :-)

How come I don't get to train the other animals?

Go ahead and train them however you like. Even untrained animals
can clobber elite humans at a sprint. That you're asking to train
them for an endurance race already makes the point that we're far
better endurance athletes than sprinters.


(See Noakes _The Lore of Running_ 4th edition for some ranking
of species for endurance ability.)

Don't know this book. What experiments did he do?

Endurance testing and training of animals. The 3rd edition included
about 200 pages of citations. The 4th puts them on the web.

--
Robert Grumbine http://www.radix.net/~bobg/ Science faqs and amateur activities notes and links.
Sagredo (Galileo Galilei) "You present these recondite matters with too much
evidence and ease; this great facility makes them less appreciated than they
would be had they been presented in a more abstruse manner." Two New Sciences

.

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