From elephants to squirrels: which animals would win a foot race?

A few years ago, a camper in the United States watched a black bear nose around the site and wondered whether he could outrun it. The answer, on consulting the data, was an emphatic no. Black bears can reach 48km/h (30mph), and running away can trigger a chase response in any case.

The question lingers, though, especially for anyone out for a jog: which animals could a human beat in a foot race? Scientists have measured the top running speeds of hundreds of creatures, from spiders and lizards to rodents, birds and large mammals, and the data holds several surprises.

Over the decades, researchers have used methods both accurate and dubious to record those speeds. In the 1920s, one naturalist drove alongside pronghorn antelopes, North America's fastest land animal, firing gunshots into the air to keep them moving. In the 1980s, scientists realised they could place smaller animals such as rats on treadmills. GPS trackers now make the task easier, and a recent study of wild cheetahs showed they can reach 93km/h (58mph).

For runners, a personal best over 5km offers a rough guide to their own top speed. A 40-minute parkrun matches the maximum sprint of a woodland vole; 30 minutes puts you alongside a rat or hamster; 25 minutes a house mouse or marine iguana; 20 minutes a striped skunk or groundhog. Andy Baddeley, the former Olympian who once held the fastest parkrun time of 13 minutes 48 seconds, would find his spirit animal in the long-nosed potoroo, a small hopping mammal of Australasia. The consolation for competitive runners is that these are the animals' maximum sprint speeds, which they cannot sustain, so a human would likely prevail by the finish line.

In 2017, the biologist Myriam Hirt, now at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research in Leipzig, compiled the running speeds of around 350 land animals to investigate how body mass affects speed. In principle, bigger animals with more muscle should run fastest. "It makes sense when you first think about it, but the data clearly shows that it doesn't work that way," she says. "The largest species are not the fastest. No one knew why." She and her colleagues concluded that large animals are constrained by the mass they carry. "You need more time to get a big body moving at the same speed as a small one," she explains, in the same way that big aircraft need longer runways. That slow acceleration means big animals begin to tire before reaching their potential top speed.

The upshot is that a human might beat some large animals over short distances. An African bush elephant can reach 35km/h (21.7mph), but is slower than a human out of the blocks and would take about 7.5 seconds to reach top speed, putting it at roughly 14 seconds over 100m — beatable for some well-trained adults. Usain Bolt, at his fastest, ran at around 44km/h, quicker than a white rhino but not a grizzly or polar bear. The cheetah and ostrich are the most famous sprinters, but the giraffe can reach 57-60km/h and would crush most humans, while the moose, zebra and reindeer are all rapid. A badger or grey squirrel, by contrast, is small enough to hit top speed within a stride or two, at around 30km/h — already faster than most joggers can sprint.

Sprinting is an anaerobic activity, requiring fast-twitch muscle, explains Baddeley, who co-founded The Running Channel. "Fast-twitch fibres are more explosive but much quicker to fatigue," he says. "Slow-twitch fibres are slower to recruit, less explosive, but can keep going for a long time without fatiguing." A sprinter can accelerate hard but will tire over longer distances, which is why Baddeley, in his Olympian middle-distance days, could run 100m in about 11.7 seconds but would beat any sprinter over 1,500m. The same applies in the animal kingdom. GPS studies show cheetahs usually hold their top speed for only a couple of seconds, and a typical hunting run is less than 200m. Pronghorn antelopes, by contrast, have been measured running 11km in 10 minutes at an average of 65km/h. As Hirt puts it, recalling an old adage: "For a predator it's your meal, but for the prey it's your life."

Humans are better suited to endurance than sprinting, thanks to their biomechanics, relative hairlessness and ability to sweat. Some evolutionary biologists speculate these adaptations evolved to help early humans pursue and tire out prey. Whether that would earn a gold medal against other animals is less clear. There is little data: non-human animals have no desire to push for a personal best in a marathon, and in the wild many would stop long before a finish line.

Databases of animal "travel speeds" — the sustained, aerobic pace animals cruise at over long distances — offer hints. A black bear's travel speed is 2.6km/h (1.6mph), a tiger's 3.5km/h and a grey wolf's 7.9km/h, all slower than the average London Marathon pace of around 9km/h. But travel speed is not the fastest an animal could run over distance. Huskies, based on their times in marathon-length sled races, could beat the human world record by more than half an hour. A horse trained for endurance would beat most people over a flat marathon, and in the annual human-versus-horse race over a mountainous 22-mile route in Wales, the horse usually wins — though humans occasionally come first.

Over ultramarathons, huskies would still probably prevail. The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in Alaska covers 1,600km, and the course record is seven days and 14 hours; the record for the Iditarod Trail Invitational, a similar-length race some humans complete on foot, is 19 days. Yet few animals are capable, or willing, to run such distances. "Ultimately, long-distance running comes down to: are you comfortable being uncomfortable?" says Baddeley. "I don't know whether you'd see that in the animal world." That mental resilience would not help, alas, against a grumpy squirrel or badger — both fast enough to leave the average jogger behind.