Related papers: Scaling in Athletic World Records

Models for human running performances of various complexities and underlying principles have been proposed, often combining data from world record performances and bio-energetic facts of human physiology. Here we present a novel, minimal…

Running world records (WRs) contain information about physiological characteristics that determine running performance. The progression of WRs over time encode the evolution of these characteristics. Here we demonstrate that a previously…

World record setting has long attracted public interest and scientific investigation. Extremal records summarize the limits of the space explored by a process, and the historical progression of a record sheds light on the underlying…

A quasi-physical model (having both physical and mathematical roots) of sprint performances is presented, accounting for the influence of drag modification via wind and altitude variations. The race time corrections for both men and women…

Track and field world records have risen and fallen throughout the history of the sport. A recent rash of record-breaking performances has prompted the question: "How good can we get?". This article offers a review of several attempts to…

A simple model based on the maximum energy that an athlete can produce in a small time interval is used to describe the high and long jump. Conservation of angular momentum is used to explain why an athlete should run horizontally to…

The statistics of records for a time series generated by a continuous time random walk is studied, and found to be independent of the details of the jump length distribution, as long as the latter is continuous and symmetric. However, the…

Though athletics statistics are abundant, it is a difficult task to quantitatively compare performances from different events of track, field, and road running in a meaningful way. There are several commonly-used methods, but each has its…

We employ the novel theory of heterogeneous extreme value statistics to accurately estimate the ultimate world records for the 100-m running race, for men and for women. For this aim we collected data from 1991 through 2023 from thousands…

Human motor activity is constrained by the rhythmicity of the 24 hours circadian cycle, including the usual 12-15 hours sleep-wake cycle. However, activity fluctuations also appear over a wide range of temporal scales, from days to a few…

The mathematical model of J. Keller for predicting World Record race times, based on a simple differential equation of motion, predicted quite well the records of the day. One of its shortcoming is that it neglects to account for a…

An analysis of marathon pacing and elevation change is presented. It is based on an empirical observation of how the pace of elite and non-elite marathon runners change over the course of the marathon and a simple approximation of the…

The aim of this paper is to bring a mathematical justification to the optimal way of organizing one's effort when running. It is well known from physiologists that all running exercises of duration less than 3mn are run with a strong…

Three aspects of time series are uncertainty (dispersion at a given time scale), scaling (time-scale dependence), and intermittency (inclination to change dynamics). Simple measures of dispersion are the mean absolute deviation and the…

We provide scientific foundations for athletic performance prediction on an individual level, exposing the phenomenology of individual athletic running performance in the form of a low-rank model dominated by an individual power law. We…

Physicists seeking to understand complex biological systems often find it rewarding to create simple "toy models" that reproduce system behavior. Here a toy model is used to understand a puzzling phenomenon from the sport of track and…

Humans typically walk at low speeds and run at higher speeds. Previous studies of transitions between walking and running were mostly on treadmills, but real-world locomotion allows more flexibility. Here, we study overground locomotion…

This paper presents a statistical analysis of speed and angular velocity obtained from pedestrian experiments across nine distinct datasets. Experimental scenarios included crossing motion, unidirectional/bidirectional flows,…

When a quantity reaches a value higher (or lower) than its value at any time before, it is said to have made a record. We numerically study the statistical properties of records in the time series of order parameters in different models…

At the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, Usain Bolt broke the world record for the 100 m sprint. Just one year later, at the 2009 World Championships in Athletics in Berlin he broke it again. A few months after Beijing, Eriksen et al.…