How fast can you run as compared to other animals? I’m sure most of us have thought about that at some point in our lives, even if only briefly. I live in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and black bears are frequent visitors. They wander through our yard, walk up the paved road in front of the house and visit our garbage cans on Thursday nights because they have figured out that garbage collection is on Friday mornings and so the cans are usually full on Thursday evenings. I was on a trip several years ago and I called my partner just as she was walking the dogs in the early evening. She pointed her phone up the street towards our house and said, “Damn, I left the garbage can out”. I looked carefully at the image I was seeing from several thousand miles away, and said, “That garbage can is moving”. It was a bear. My partner wore her glasses after that whenever she walked the dogs at night! Could she have outrun it…absolutely not. Which was one of the reasons I found the following article interesting.
“Ever wondered if you could beat a bear or a horse in a race? What about a rat or a rhino? The answers may surprise you.
A few years ago, I was camping in the US, and a black bear happened to pass nearby. As I watched it nose around the camp, I wondered: if I needed to, could I outrun it? Looking up bear speeds afterwards, the answer was clear: absolutely not. Apart from the fact that running away can trigger a chase response, so is not advised, black bears can reach up to 48km/h (30mph).
Ever since then though – especially while out for a jog in London – I’ve found myself asking: what animals could I beat in a foot race? What if I encountered a particularly mean squirrel or badger?
Only Noah could have staged a real animal Olympics, but scientists have measured the top running speeds of hundreds of creatures – squirrels and badgers, but also spiders, lizards, rodents, birds, large mammals, and many more. It turns out there are quite a few surprises in the data.
So, which land animal would be your own closest competitor? And what would give the world’s fastest humans a good race?
Over the decades, scientists have measured animals’ top speed using differing methods – some more accurate (and ethical) than others. In the 1920s, one naturalist drove his car alongside pronghorn antelopes – North America’s fastest land animal – firing gunshots in the air to keep them going. In the 1980s, researchers realised they could place smaller animals like rats on treadmills.
Nowadays, though, technology like GPS trackers make the task easier, especially for recording animals in their natural habitat at real-world speeds. One recent study that tracked cheetahs in the wild showed they can reach 93km/h (58mph). Previous measurements were based on film recordings, or in one case, artificially inducing the cheetah to chase a hunk of meat held by a stopwatch operator riding in a 4×4. Hardly accurate, or relastic!
Many runners might be unsure about their precise top speed, but will know their personal best (PB) over 5km (3.1 miles). That’s the distance of a parkrun, a free running event with over 12 million registered participants worldwide. (I must admit I had never heard of a parkrun and I certainly don’t know my PB number).
So, if you run a 40-minute 5k, you’re matching the top speed of a woodland vole. If your PB is 30 minutes, it’s a rat or a hamster. A time of 25 minutes is a house mouse or a marine iguana. And 20 minutes, a striped skunk or a groundhog. Enlightening, don’t you think.
The good news for the competitive runner is that these are the animals’ maximum sprint times, which they couldn’t hold, so you’d likely beat them by the finish line. (However, you might have been eaten by then!!)
Sometimes, though, simple methods have also worked fine. In another recent study, researchers measured what might be the world’s fastest spider (Australia’s brown huntsman) by simply nudging it and then video-recording it next to a ruler. While its average pace was around 7km/h (4.3mph), its top speed in bursts was a discomfiting 13km/h (8mph).
The slow acceleration of big animals – it takes time to get that mass moving – means you might be capable of beating some of them in a race, especially over short distances. For example, an African bush elephant can reach a top speed of 35km/h (21.7mph), but they are slower than humans out of the blocks. (This reminded me of an episode in Tsavo National Park in Kenya, years ago, when I/my car was briefly charged by a very large elephant. He stopped after a few paces, which was more than could have been said of my heart rate!)
Olympic sprinter Usain Bolt could probably outrun the bush elephant easily – but even he would be overtaken by many other animals. If we are talking about simply comparing top sprint speeds – without the variable of mass and acceleration – Bolt’s fastest pace during his world record run was around 44km/h (27-28mph). That’s faster than the top speed of a white rhino (40km/h or 24.8mph), but not those of grizzly or polar bears (48-50km/h or 30-31mph). And plenty of animals reach even faster top speeds.
The most famous sprinters are the cheetah (93km/h or 58mph), or ostrich (82.8km/h or 51.4mph), but some are lesser known. As a thin and lanky runner, I’d hoped that a giraffe might be my own closest animal competitor, but I was surprised to learn they can reach up to around 57-60km/h (35-37mph), so they would easily catch me – and Bolt – in a sprint. The moose is pretty rapid too (55.4km/h or 34.4mph), as is the zebra (70.6km/h or 43.8mph) – and a reindeer can reach speeds of 80km/h (49.7mph). I suppose Santa would be pleased. (I should add here that I was recently driving in the mountains, close to home, when my peripheral vision saw something. I moose was keeping pace with me alongside the truck. So know that piece of data is true!!).
Finally, a horse that is trained for endurance, could beat a majority of people over a flat marathon. Although it does depend on the terrain. Every year in Wales there’s a human vs horse race over a mountainous route about 22 miles (35km) long. The horse usually wins, but occasionally humans have come first. (Aren’t you glad you know that?…that the Welsh are crazy, I mean!)
Unfortunately, all this wouldn’t help me if I was out for a jog and encountered a particularly grumpy grey squirrel or badger. Could I outrun them if they went for me? Probably not. Unlike bigger animals like elephants, they are both small enough to hit their top speed in a stride or two, and that pace, around 30km/h (18.6mph), is already higher than my sprint pace. I may have to start training a little harder.
I found this article enlightening, but also amusing enough to make me laugh! I hope the same happens to you.
