Athletes could run faster, statisticians say - 06/02/2006
[This is the print version of story
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/s.../s1559791.htm]
Athletes could run faster, statisticians say
Judy Skatssoon
ABC Science Online
Monday, 6 February 2006
Moroccan runner Hicham El Guerrouj's world record will be left in the dust one day, according to a mathematical analysis of times for the men's one mile race (Image: Reuters/David Gray)
Athletes could run the mile 18 seconds faster than the current record, according to an Australian mathematician who's gone back over the past hundred years of records.
Dr Michael Deakin of Melbourne's Monash University first calculated the absolute limit for the distance 40 years ago when he declared it to be 3 minutes 32 seconds.
He will tell a meeting of the Australian and New Zealand Industrial and Applied Mathematics group later today that he has since revised the data.
He now says athletes could run the mile in 3 minutes 25 seconds, much faster than the existing record of 3 minutes 43 seconds set by Morocco's Hicham El Guerrouj in 1999.
Deakin says more sophisticated computing technology and more records led him to revisit his earlier work.
"The reason for revisiting [my original study] is twofold," he says.
"There's a much bigger data set than there used to be and secondly you've got all sorts of computational tools you didn't back then.
"So I thought I'd give it another run for its money."
He didn't make any estimate of when, if ever, this new height in athletic performance would be scaled.
Deakin arrived at the figure using non-linear trend analysis, a branch of statistics commonly used in economic forecasting.
"I plot the different records ... and then I drive a trend curve through it ...which cuts out all the ups and downs," he says.
"The idea of the trend curve is to have a line at the top which more or less always will be achieved, and a line at the bottom which is never to be achieved."
In the past he's also used the method to estimate calcium in the bodies of dialysis patients and the trajectory of arrows as described in a passage of Ancient Roman poetry.
A three minute mile?
The mile, the equivalent of 1609 metres, has been replaced by the 1500 metres but is still common in some countries.
And although international athletics bodies now only recognise world records for metric distances, they have made an exception for the mile and still keep records today.
The mile was once famed for the 4 minute barrier which, was thought to be impossible until Englishman Roger Bannister's time of a little over 3 minutes 59 seconds in 1954.
Speculation has now shifted to the 3 minute barrier, although most experts agree that athletes are unlikely to meet this without some sort of assistance.
Dr Shane Brun, a senior lecturer in medicine at James Cook University and vice-president of Sports Doctors Australia, says it's almost impossible to predict the bounds of athletic performance.
But humans will reach a stage where they simply can't get any better without some form of modification, he says.
"Whether that's through evolution or science or drugs we just don't know," he says.
Math & Running
Linear Mode
