| Has Running Hit the Wall? |
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15 November 2005, for ScienceNOW Runners test the limits of human endurance. But a new study suggests that they may not have that much further to go. To trim seconds off their times, runners continue to tweak their training and nutrition regimens. And as more of the world's population gets involved in world-class racing, the pool of potential record breakers grows. Researchers know the sky is not the limit. However, the peak has not been clear. Now, sport scientists Alan Nevill of the University of Wolverhampton in Walsall, U.K., and Gregory Whyte of the English Institute of Sport in Bisham, U.K., find that improvements in world-record running speeds show signs of tapering off. The researchers reanalyzed data from present time back to 1910 for world records in races from the 800-meter to the 44-kilometer marathon and found that they got statistically better fits with so-called S-curves. The curves reflect gradual improvement in the early years, when runners were amateurs, followed by rapid speed increases as the sport became professionalized around the mid-1900s. Since the 1980s, however, these advances began to slow and will soon plateau, the authors report in the October issue of Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.The researchers' model suggests that, in the races they studied, men's records will peak sometime between 2020 and 2060 after getting only 1% to 3% faster than they are now. Women's times appear to be leveling off even sooner. In the women's 1500-meter race, for example, there has only been one new world record since 1980, suggesting that women may have already hit the wall, the researchers report. The model is better than earlier projections, says physiologist Stephen Seiler of Agder College in Kristiansand, Norway. But the leveling off is sharper and more statistically significant for women than for men, so it's less certain how close men are to their limits, he adds. Physiologist Brian Whipp of the University of Leeds in the U.K. says that although researchers expected runners' speeds to level off eventually, the study suggests that the era of runners reaching their limits is "closer than one might have imagined." |