What is the top speed a human can run?

Answer 1

AnswerI just saw Reggie Bush hit 22 mph on MNF - he is wearing pads and carrying a football. I am guessing a top sprinter would be 10-20% faster, so maybe 26 ish mph?

{Author A}In the Olympics a man ran a 9.6 sec hundred meter dash. There are 16 of these in a mile. So 9.6x16=153.6 is the time used to cover 1609 meters (Aka: a mile) in seconds. Divide the 153.6/60 to convert to minutes and you get 2.56minutes/mile. Divide how many of those you can cram into an hour and you get 60/2.56= 23.43mph.

{Author B}or you could just take 100 meters times 3.2808399 which would tell you how many feet are in 100 meters. then the formula to calculate speed would be (speed=distance\time) so speed=328.08399ft / 9.69 seconds, and you get an answer of 33.85799 miles per hour. So the fastest a human has ever ran would be about 34 miles per hour.

{Author C}-edit- your calculations on the first example are correct, however the second example is wrong. What you would want to do is take 5280(ft/mile) and divide it by 328.08399(the distance ran). This gives you 16.0934399 (roughly a 16th of a mile), then you would multiply this by the amount of time it took him to run the 16th mile (9.69). This gives you 155.945433, the amount in seconds it would take him to run a full mile if he were to maintain his speed that long. Divide this number by 60 (tells you how many minutes are in 155.945433 seconds) which gives us 2.59909055. Take 60 and divide by the 2.59909055 and you would get 23.08 which is the mph.

{Author D} Calculations for A and C are correct however we have not taken into account the time taken to get up to the top speed in a 100metre sprint. So the top speed would be even faster, as these calculations are only average speeds.