Word: mile
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...almost any standard, the best yardstick for measuring how steadily--if slowly--athletic performance has improved is the mile run. In 1900 the record for the mile was a comparatively sleepy 4 min. 12 sec. It wasn't until 1954 that Roger Bannister of Britain cracked the 4-min. mark, coming in six-tenths of a second under the charmed figure. In the half-century since, uncounted thousands of mile heats have been run, yet less than 17 additional seconds have been shaved off Bannister's record--about a third of a second per year...
...conceivable the record could be 3 min. 30 sec. in 50 years," says American Olympic miler Steve Holman. "But bringing it down much more is a long way off." Scientists agree. In 1987 researchers at Canada's McGill University developed a mathematical model that predicted a world mile record of precisely...
...human body down is less the architecture of its skeleton than the chemistry of its muscles. The key to speed is making muscles contract faster, and the key to that is gassing them up with as much oxygen as possible. "About 80% of the energy used to run a mile," explains physiologist Peter Weyand of Harvard University, "comes directly from oxygen...
Muscles process oxygen through cellular components known as the mitochondria. Human mitochondria take up only about 3% of the space in a cell. But in animals that run the fastest, mitochondria are far bigger; the mitochondria of an antelope--an animal that easily runs a 2-min. mile and does so in wispy mountain air 7,000 ft. up--are three times larger than ours. "If you could genetically engineer humans to have more mitochondria, bigger hearts and more blood vessels," says Weyand, "we might run about 40 m.p.h...
...designed to run--suffer all manner of physical ills, from fractured legs to bleeding lungs, as a result of overuse. "You don't have these problems in antelopes and cheetahs, but in horses, we've apparently pushed to the limit," says Weyand. "If a human ran a 2-min. mile, you might see the same thing...