One hundred and fifty years of sprint and distance running – Past trends and future prospects

Sprint and distance running have experienced remarkable performance improvements over the past century. Attempts to forecast running performances share an almost similarly long history but have relied so far on relatively short data series. Here, we compile a comprehensive set of season-best performances for eight Olympically-contested running events. We conduct with this set (i) an exponential time series analysis and (ii) a power-law experience curve analysis to quantify the rate of past performance improvements and to forecast performances until 2100. We find that the sprint and distance running performances of women and men improve exponentially with time and converge at yearly rates of 4 ± 3% and 2 ± 2%, respectively towards their asymptotic limits. Running performances can also be modeled with the experience curve approach, yielding learning rates of 3 ± 1% and 6 ± 2% for the women’s and men’s events, respectively. The long-term trends suggest that (i) women will continue to run 10-20% slower than men, (ii) 9.50 s over 100 m dash may only be broken at the end of this century, and (iii) several middle- and long-distance records may be broken within the next two to three decades. The prospects of witnessing a sub-2 hour marathon before 2100 are inconclusive. Our results should be interpreted cautiously as forecasting human behavior is intrinsically uncertain. The future sprint and distance running performances will continue to scatter around the trends identified here and may yield unexpected improvements in the standing world records.

WEISS Martin;  NEWMAN Alexandra;  WHITMORE Ceri;  WEISS Stephan; 

2016-04-20

TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD

JRC95606

1746-1391,   

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17461391.2015.1042526,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC95606,   

10.1080/17461391.2015.1042526,