Word: weyand
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Looking forward, "no one can really know exactly how fast a human may be able to run," says Dennis Bramble, professor of biology at the University of Utah. Certainly, runners have been getting faster, as far as we know, but as Peter Weyand, an expert in biomechanics at Southern Methodist University, points out, our history of recorded time in sprints is relatively brief. "We have no way of knowing if humans might not have been even faster centuries or millennia ago," he says...
Popular history tells us that American troops were caught napping when North Vietnam launched the Tet offensive. Yet while Vietnam celebrated its new year, at least one top U.S. Army officer was practically lying in wait. General Fred Weyand couldn't stop American officials in Saigon from throwing a party on Tet's Eve, replete with Chinese firecrackers and a lawn band. Convinced of an imminent strike, however, Weyand kept his troops close to Saigon, and officers in his camp placed bets on the timing. All wagered that the strike would start between midnight...
...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...
...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...
...bred and trained for speeds they were not 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...