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How fast to run if you’re stranded in the desert

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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I had an interesting interview this morning with Karen Steudel of the University of Wisconsin’s Hominin Locomotion Laboratory, for an upcoming feature in Canadian Running magazine. She’s the researcher who caused a stir a few weeks ago with a study revealing that each person has an “optimum running speed” where we burn the least number of calories per mile (nicely summarized by Dan Peterson of 80percentmental here). Until now, strange as it may seem, researchers thought that it would take you exactly the same number of calories to run a mile, no matter what pace you ran at.

Steudel’s real interest is in whether our ancestors a few million years ago were efficient enough runners to chase animals for hours until they collapsed of heat exhaustion, a technique known as persistence hunting. But she’s well aware that the idea of an “optimum speed” might be of interest to runners (and she’s apparently receiving tons of e-mail asking for training advice!). The optimal paces in her study were about 7:14 per mile for men and 9:14 per mile for women — but with just nine subjects, the study is too small to take those numbers too seriously. However, she’s now back in the lab working on a new study trying to determine how limb length affects that optimal speed — another result that will be of interest both to evolutionary biologists and runners.

So what do we do with this information? Well, I’ve often pondered the scenario where you’re stranded in the desert with no food, 100 miles from the nearest aid, and you have to decide what your strategy is. Do you run? Walk? How fast? Seems like if you know your optimal pace, you can maximize your odds…

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Future tech: read on the treadmill with “stabilized text”

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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treadmill-readingThere’s a big conference on human-computer interaction going on in Boston right now. Not a hotbed of sports-related research, but I noticed this fantastic research project from Purdue University’s Healthcare and Information Visualization Engineering (HIVE) Lab:

“ReadingMate: An Infrared-Camera-Based Content Stabilization Technique to Help Joggers Read While Running on a Treadmill.”

The contraption monitors the bobbing of your head, and makes the text that you’re trying to read bob up and down on a screen, so that it seems to you that it’s not moving at all. Seems unlikely, but… Continue reading “Future tech: read on the treadmill with “stabilized text””

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Why fatigue and illness aren’t the same as “overtraining”

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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Got an interesting e-mail about overtraining from a Jockology reader named Nathan:

I used to train frequently and at a high exertion level, as a result I […] was often fatigued and sick. It also appeared that other athletes arround me who exercised frequently for sport specific activities (e.g., triathlons, distance running, cycling, etc.) were also sick frequently.

This is a pretty common observation — if exercise is a miracle drug, I guess this is the fine print. Nathan goes on to frame the question in terms of a hypothetical graph of health benefits versus amount of exercise. As activity increases, health improves — but at a certain point, it begins to plateau, and eventually more exercise actually makes you less healthy.

There’s an element of truth to this, but it’s not the full story. Continue reading “Why fatigue and illness aren’t the same as “overtraining””

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More caffeine: it kills pain, even in habitual users

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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A new study from the University of Illinois finds yet another way that caffeine boosts performance. Twenty-five cyclists performed intense half-hour exercise sessions, after consuming either a caffeine pill or a placebo; the caffeine group experienced less pain in their quadriceps. Interesting, but not earth-shattering, since we already knew that caffeine is probably the most versatile and powerful legal performance enhancer out there.

What’s most notable is this:

“What we saw is something we didn’t expect: caffeine-naïve individuals and habitual users have the same amount of reduction in pain during exercise after caffeine (consumption),” [said lead researcher Robert Motl].

This is the phenomenon discussed last week: even if you drink several cups of coffee a day, you’ll still get the same performance boost from a caffeine pill that a complete abstainer will. (And it may even work better for you, since you won’t be knocked off-balance by caffeine’s effects.) Nobody’s really sure why it works this way, but the Illinois study provides more evidence that it’s true.

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Exercise decline and aging: chickens and eggs

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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I just noticed a new paper in the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology by University of Ottawa prof Bradley Young and his collaborators, who have produced a series of interesting studies on masters athletes. In this case, they were looking at the lifetime training of competitive 10-kilometre runners between the ages of 40-59, exploring the following idea:

Researchers have contended that patterns of age-related decline are not necessarily due to age, but rather to disuse, or declining practice.

In other words, everyone knows we get slower (and weaker and feebler and so on) as we get older. But how much of this is directly due to aging, and how much is simply because we’re less active than we were in our salad days? Continue reading “Exercise decline and aging: chickens and eggs”