Could I beat an Olympic marathoner if I were to run it as a relay-race with unlimited clones of myself.
A first blush, surely I could sprint a short distance above a Olympic marathon pace, so given enough clones and short enough segments certainly I would win. But I must also factor in the slow-downs of handing off the baton, and there is where it gets interesting.
The current world record of a marathon is right around 2 hours, or 7,200 seconds (run by someone my age btw). That's about a 4:30 minute (273 seconds) mile pace. At first I figured I could sprint a 1/4 mile at a Olympic marathon pace, but I'm realistically questioning that I could run the 400 meters in 68 seconds. The Alaska state high school 400 record (assuming Alaskans are the slowest runners) is 50 seconds. So I'm thinking it would take more than 102 clones of me to win the race.
A marathon is 42,200 meters. If instead I broke it into 100 meters sections that might give me a better chance. The Olympic pace is ~17 seconds per 100 meters. Ugh. The Alaska state high school record for the 100 meter dash is 11 seconds. I bet I could run it in 14 or 15 seconds. But how much time would I lose in the baton hand-offs? I'm assuming only a second or two, which would make it a very close race.
Anything shorter than 100 meters, I thought the hand-offs would slow me (us?) down too much, anything longer I'm not sure I could keep the pace. So I think me and 421 clones of myself could run a pretty close race against an Olympic marathoner.
There are two take-aways here. One, Olympic marathoners are absolute freaks who are running twenty-six consecutive 4:30 miles. Two, it's amazing how two humans could be so disparate at something like running. How can one human's body be so much more adapt through genetics and training at something as universal as running? It blows my mind that I would have trouble running 100 meters as the same pace an Olympic marathoner runs 26 miles.
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