Apparently this formula is pretty dated and not very accurate as seen here. It is true that maximum heart rate for athletes can vary from 160-220 for a 20 year old person, so the 240 number I quoted is reasonable, but apparently endurance athletes tend to have lower rates than sprinters, and the difference may not be as important as I was led to believe.

So why was our coach beating on us to achieve a 180 pulse when for all he knew our max could have been 160? What an idiot!

If we really think Bolt would break and/or shatter the WR in long jumping doesn't that pretty much answer the question? Or were there potential world record breakers 30 years ago skipping the sport as well?

I mean variance could be a factor, but that seems secondary here.

lol

Men's long jump had a very unusual progression. Beamon's jump in '68 was an extraordinary outlier, probably the greatest track and field performance of all time when compared to the state of the competition at the time. It really is inexplicable and he never approached that mark again. Had he continued the WR on a more normal progression, it likely would have been broken many times up to Powell.

The high jump and pole vault records are very difficult to break as well, although some rule changes have had an effect on this. Bubka himself actually pushed some of these rules changes after getting onto the IOC. They have shortened the pegs on which the crossbar sits as well as rounded the top edge of the rubber ends of crossbar that sit on the pegs, making it more difficult for the bar to stay in place when touched by the vaulter. Bubka had longer pegs with square end pieces. Physically, not sure why they haven't been exceeded yet.

Bruce,

While I wasn't anything special myself beyond a good high school athlete, but I did train race horses on the highest level for 35 years and have monitored heart rates and run a million blood chems on the best of the best and I can confidently say their max heart rate isn't the limiting factor. H+ ion concentration is. It is how they metabolize sugars/fats to produce energy and handle waste products (lactate).

Give a well conditioned race horse 8 oz of NaHC03 about 60 minutes before their performance and you can be sure their mile time will drop by about 1.1 seconds.

I think you will find the ratio of slow twitch to high twitch muscle fibers the key to distance running. There is a reason a preponderance of the elite distance distance runners in the world can trace their ancestry to within a few hundred miles of the Rift Valley (Kenya, Ethiopia)

The really sick thing is that a slow twitch guy like Gebrselassie can run the last 200m of a 10K in 24s or something absurd.

swinging, how much spiking goes on in horse racing? Probably no one here knows but I wonder how much it goes on in human racing as well...

Interesting. I heard that Secretariat's heart was like 3 times normal size (literally and figuratively) and that was a big factor to his success. Any truth to that?

EDIT: Confirmed from wiki it was 2.75 times average size.

I actually tried to find out why the best marathoners come from Kenya. I didn't see your reason in the article I read, but there are different theories, including a high interest in the sport among people trying to get out of poverty there, and intense training including high altitude training.

I always felt I was at a big disadvantage in cross-country because the fast guys were always smaller less muscular guys. I was built more like a sprinter.

meh, I think that over the course of an elite long jumper's career peak they do enough jumps in enough major competitions to flatten out the variance. Now if you said the same thing about simply Olympic records than maybe.

What about cricketer Don Bradman's batting average? This image showcases it well:

Yep. He never even jumped 27 feet again, after jumping 29 feet 2 1/2 inches in Mexico City.

Secretariat on necropsy was discovered to have an enormous sized heart. The only people that argue that is the primary factor in athletic performance are the guys trying to sell you devices to measure heart size externally.

Bruce,

If training at altitude was a factor Mexicans from Mexico City and Nepalese shirpas would be great marathoners, but , on the whole, they are not.

Every competitive distance athlete today works out by the live high / train low philosophy. This is a system that allows the person to sleep in a tent with ~ 15% O2 rather than the normal 21% O2 which simulates being at about 10,000 ft above sea level. This lowering of O2 in the air tricks the human kidney into producing more erythropoeiten (the hormone that stimulates red blood cell production) which increases hematocrit naturally. It is a cute way around the blood doping rules.

Live high /train low is better than living high/ training high because the athlete can do more reps and push harder at sea level, while gaining the physiologic benefits of resting at altitude.

So the Kenyans being excellent because of living at altitude kinda goes out the window.

The reason most great sprinters are descended from West Africans and most great distance runners are from East African stock is because of their differences in striated muscle fiber type composition. This is demonstrable by muscle fiber biopsy and other similar methods:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21760934

Almost 100% to some degree. There are a lot of gray areas in the medication rules. Most rules state there cannot be any detectable level of any drug in the horses system when you present him to race and you cannot give a horses anything other than his normal feed stuffs within 24 hours of a race. There is an FDA regulation that says a licensed vet can give a horse anything that is FDA approved in the pharmacopia at his discretion. So these rules collide sometimes.

Sorry, what I was implying by 'spiking' was somehow sneaking a substance into a rival horse that would slow them down.

I am not aware of a single instance of this. That doesn't mean it hasn't happened, but rumors fly on the back stretch of a racetrack and I've never encountered any in 35 years.

I think David Sklansky would argue, and I would agree, that it is highly improbable that his heart size and his performance are not correlated.

The article I read said that very thing.

Logically though, it could be a combination of altitude with other factors, like the popularity of the sport in Kenya. Not saying that's true, just that logically this argument by itself, barring the other things you mentioned, has a flaw.

They gave cocaine to a horse to make him overbreathe, hence slow down, on an episode of CSI Miami.

this article talks about kenya's long distance running success (bit about kenya starts about halfway down and continues into subsequent parts): http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/tra...ng-part-1.html

Any ideas about pole vault record ?
Bubka did 6.14/6.15 (outdoors/indoors) and it looked like he had huge margin on some 6m+ jumps. His potential was probably much higher if he had any competition.
Now polish guy won world championship with 5.90 jump yesterday and it's almost 20 years after Bubka's domination.

Did you read the thread? Bubka, coincidentally, among others pushed for rules changes that made the pegs on which the bar rests shorter and changed the rubber end pieces over the bar from square to rounded at the top. This will make it more difficult to break his record. Also, Bubka was a badass, so there's that too.

From what I've seen he jumped 6m being 30-40cm over the bar and not close to touching it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMGTiQClVMM

I doubt new rules have anything to do with his records standing that long.

Pretty much this, but I felt like I'd inform you that you're totally wrong about table tennis.

Table tennis isn't popular in America, that's for sure. But it is taken very seriously in China and some European countries. It would be silly to say the game isn't improving each year. But of course, it's not as easy to make an objective measure of this (as it is with long jump). Still I have little doubt that modern players would crush players from an earlier era.

LaVillanie (sp?) cleared 5.80 by maybe 50cms yesterday and has done 6.01 but is horribly inconsistent.