The animals you can outrun — and the ones that would leave you for dust

A few years ago, a writer camping in the United States watched a black bear nose around the camp and wondered whether he could outrun it. The answer, on checking the figures afterwards, was clear: absolutely not. Black bears reach up to 48km/h, and running away can trigger a chase response anyway.

The question lingers, though, especially on a jog through London: which animals could a human beat in a foot race? Only Noah could have staged a real animal Olympics, but scientists have measured the top running speeds of hundreds of creatures — squirrels and badgers, spiders, lizards, birds and large mammals among them — and the data contains a fair few surprises.

Over the decades the methods have varied, some more accurate and ethical than others. In the 1920s one naturalist drove alongside pronghorn antelopes, North America's fastest land animal, firing gunshots into the air to keep them going; in the 1980s researchers realised they could put smaller animals such as rats on treadmills. Today GPS trackers make the task easier, allowing animals to be recorded in their natural habitat at real-world speeds. A recent study tracking wild cheetahs showed they can reach 93km/h, where earlier measurements relied on film recordings or, in one case, luring a cheetah to chase a hunk of meat held by a stopwatch operator in a 4x4.

Many runners know their personal best over 5km rather than their precise top speed. A 40-minute parkrun, it turns out, matches the top speed of a woodland vole; 30 minutes puts you level with a rat or hamster; 25 minutes with a house mouse or marine iguana; and 20 minutes with a striped skunk or groundhog. Andy Baddeley, the former Olympian who once held the fastest parkrun time of 13 minutes 48 seconds, would be a long-nosed potoroo, a small hopping mammal of Australasia. The consolation for competitive runners is that these are maximum sprints the animals could not sustain, so over a full course a human would probably prevail.

Simple methods can work too. In another recent study, researchers measured what may be the world's fastest spider, Australia's brown huntsman, by nudging it and videoing it beside a ruler. Its average pace was about 7km/h, but in bursts it reached a discomfiting 13km/h.

Such scattered measurements have gradually been compiled into larger databases. Myriam Hirt, a biologist now at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research in Leipzig, assembled the running speeds of around 350 land animals. In 2017 she and her colleagues investigated 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."

The team concluded that the largest animals are held back by the mass they carry. "You need more time to get a big body moving at the same speed as a small one," Hirt explains, much as big planes need longer runways, or anyone who has played Mario Kart knows that tiny Toad accelerates faster than bulky Donkey Kong. That slow take-off means big animals begin to tire before reaching their theoretical top speed. "You only have a limited amount of energy available for acceleration. At some point you just collapse, because there's no energy left in your muscles."

This sluggish acceleration means some large animals can be beaten, especially over short distances. An African bush elephant can reach 35km/h but is slower than a human out of the blocks; a second database, compiled in 2020, suggests it would take about 7.5 seconds to reach top speed, implying a 100m time of roughly 14 seconds — beyond many of us, but beatable by well-trained adults.

Usain Bolt could probably outrun the bush elephant easily, yet even he would be overtaken by many other animals. His fastest pace during his world record run was around 44km/h, quicker than a white rhino at 40km/h but slower than a grizzly or polar bear at 48-50km/h. And plenty of animals go faster still: the cheetah at 93km/h, the ostrich at 82.8km/h, the giraffe at around 57-60km/h, the moose at 55.4km/h, the zebra at 70.6km/h and the reindeer at 80km/h.

Sprinting, however, is an anaerobic activity requiring fast-twitch muscle, as Baddeley, co-founder of The Running Channel, explains. "Fast-twitch fibres are more explosive but much quicker to fatigue," he says, while slow-twitch fibres "are slower to recruit, less explosive, but can keep going for a long time". In his Olympian middle-distance days he reckons he could run the 100m in about 11.7 seconds — a close race with a gorilla, but slower than an elite sprinter. Over 500m he believes he could push an elite sprinter close, and over his specialist 1,500m he would certainly win, because his body holds speed for longer.

The same pattern holds in the animal kingdom. The GPS study of cheetahs showed they usually hold top speed for only a couple of seconds, with a typical hunting run under 200m; they are sprinters, not endurance athletes. 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. So the pressure to be quick is much higher on prey than on predators."

Humans are better suited to long-distance endurance than sprinting, thanks to our biomechanics and the fact that we are mostly hairless and sweat. Some evolutionary biologists speculate these adaptations evolved to help us pursue and tire out prey over many kilometres. Whether that would earn a gold medal against other animals is another matter. Non-human animals have no desire to push themselves to a marathon personal best, and in the lab it could be unethical to make them; in the wild, many would stop long before a finish line.

For hints, scientists have compiled "travel speeds" — the sustained, aerobic pace animals comfortably cruise at. A black bear's travel speed is 2.6km/h, a tiger's 3.5km/h, a dromedary camel's 6.3km/h and a grey wolf's 7.9km/h — all slower than the average London Marathon pace of about 9km/h, and far slower than the world record of 1:59:30 set this year, run at an average of 21km/h. Travel speed is not necessarily an animal's fastest long-distance pace, though; it is closer to human walking. A bear probably could cover a long distance quicker, but whether it would overheat and burn out at marathon pace is difficult to say.

Still, humans would not be the best marathon runners in the animal kingdom, despite our endurance adaptations and mental will. Husky dogs can traverse great distances at speed; judging by marathon-length sled races, they could beat the human world record by more than half an hour, and would likely be faster still unladen. An endurance-trained horse could beat most people over a flat marathon, though terrain matters. Every year in Wales a human versus horse race runs over a mountainous route of about 22 miles; the horse usually wins, but humans have occasionally come first.

Over ultramarathons the picture is murkier, though huskies still probably prevail. The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in Alaska covers 1,600km, and while it is a team event, some dogs run the entire distance; the course record is seven days and 14 hours. The record for the Iditarod Trail Invitational, a similar-length race that some humans complete on foot, is 19 days, 9 hours and 38 minutes.

Few animals are capable, or willing, to run ultramarathons, and at such distances the human brain is its own superpower. Consider the Self-Transcendence 3,100 Mile Race around a single block in Queens, New York: the current record-holder ran for more than 40 days, with six-hour breaks at night, at an average moving pace of roughly 6.9km/h. "Ultimately, long-distance running comes down to: are you comfortable being uncomfortable? Are you suffering?" Baddeley says. "There's still that ability to access another energy system at the end of a long run — to go through the pain and still sprint when the finish line's in sight. I don't know whether you'd see that in the animal world."

None of which would help against a particularly grumpy grey squirrel or badger. Both are small enough to hit top speed in a stride or two, and that pace, around 30km/h, already exceeds a modest human sprint. The writer may have to start training a little harder.