For many recreational runners, taking a jog is a fun way to stay fit and burn calories. But it turns out an individual has a tendency to settle into the same, comfortable pace on short and long runs — and that pace is the one that minimizes their body’s energy use over a given distance.
“I was really surprised,” says Jessica Selinger, a biomechanist at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. “Intuitively, I would have thought people run faster at shorter distances and slow their pace at longer distances.”
Selinger and colleagues combined data from more than 4,600 runners, who went on 37,201 runs while wearing a fitness device called the Lumo Run, with lab-based physiology data. The analysis, described April 28 in Current Biology, also shows that it takes more energy for someone to run a given distance if they run faster or slower than their optimum speed.
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