“It was astonishing,” Dr Bramble explains. “Even though the horse has long legs and four of them, David had a longer stride.” David was in great shape for a scientist, but as a medium-height, medium-weight, middle-of-the-pack runner, he was perfectly average. That left only one explanation: as bizarre as it may seem, the average human has a longer stride than a horse. The horse looks like its taking giant lunges forward, but its hooves swing back before touching the ground. The result: even though biomechanically smooth human runners have short strides, they still cover much more distance per step than a horse, making them more efficient. With equal amounts of gas in the tank, in other words, a human can theoretically run farther than a horse.
Christopher McDougall, Born to Run (p.222)
First published in 2009
“Moon-Eye, let me tell you something. I can outrun you if I have to. These Utah cowboys would laugh themselves sick if I ever mentioned it out loud but it’s a fact and you ought to know it. Over the long haul, say twenty or thirty miles, it’s a known fact that a healthy man can outrun a horse.”
Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (p.147)
First published in 1968
It is humbling and wonderful and also sad to read books that remind me how much knowledge has been “a known fact” at one point in history, and then sunk into obscurity and been forgotten, only to be, years later, the kind of thing that gets described as “astonishing” and “one of their first big discoveries” (Born to Run, p.221).