The shorter the distance, the faster we can keep going. The typical guy jogs at 8.3 mph, covering 100 meters in 27 seconds, whereas the average woman runs at 6.5 mph, reaching 100 meters in 34 seconds. The quickest of us can sprint 100m in between 13 and 14 seconds at a pace of 15.9 mph. So, technically, you could run this distance in less than 10 minutes if you kept running at our best speed forever.
In reality, though, you wouldn't last very long at such a rate, since human beings are not designed to run this fast for so long. The maximum length of a race is defined by the time it takes to finish 100 meters, but even that distance is close to the limit of what most people can endure.
At some point, your body will start to suffer consequences of all those rapid strides. Your lungs will burn, your legs will tremble, and you'll likely get sick from all the coughing. But even after they stop being functional sports organs, they're still working muscles - ones that you can use in other ways when necessary. Thus, although running a 100-meter dash is certainly not the best use of your time or energy, it isn't completely useless either. Even though you cannot physically cover more than 100 meters in under 10 minutes, your brain and your body still learn something new every time you do so. And that is exactly why we should all spend some time running back and forth between two points on the ground.
Many athletes' average sprinting speed is 24 kmh (15 mph). Over 100m, that speed will give you a time of roughly 14 seconds. Elite athletes will be running at roughly 26 miles per hour.
Typical men's world record sprinter Usain Bolt runs around 30km/h (19mph). That's about 12 seconds for 100 meters! An Olympic gold medalist in this event ran 9.79 seconds at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. The fastest man on earth has never beaten that time but American Justin Gatlin broke the nine-second barrier in 2009.
Bolt's teammate Yohan Blake holds the current African record with 9.56 seconds. Two other Africans, Kenyans David Rudisha and Moses Mosop, have also broken the 10-second mark several times each.
Women's records are less common because they usually run over 200 meters. The current world best is 22.43 seconds achieved by Russian Darya Klishina in 2014. Another Russian, Milana Jauharova, owns the former record with a time of 21.92 seconds set in 2009. Other fast women include Americans Lauryn Williams and Dawn Harper-Nelson.
There are two ways to improve as a sprinter. First, you can work on your top speed. This means going faster without falling over!
How fast can a human run in a physical sense? —Steve from Davis, California So far, the quickest time has been around 27 1/2 miles per hour, which sprinter Usain Bolt achieved (briefly) shortly after the midway of his world-record 100-meter dash in 2009.
This is very close to the speed of sound, so it's not really possible to run faster than this unless you use energy saving devices such as rockets or jet engines.
The maximum human running speed is about 190 miles per hour. Some people have been reported to reach speeds as high as 200 miles per hour during training sessions, but none of them has ever done so under race conditions where fear of injury prevents any from attempting it.
Running is among the most effective means of getting away from danger, so it makes sense that humans have evolved to be good runners. However, even though we are biological organisms subject to disease and death, there is no reason why we could not evolve further improvements in our running abilities. In fact, scientists have already developed some species-specific technologies for running sports that have been successfully tested on humans.
One such technology is heat-shielding clothing that blocks heat-producing fluids that accumulate when an athlete runs at a high pace for a long period of time. These fluids can cause serious health problems if not removed regularly.
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