Can it be repeated?

The current (at the time of writing) men’s 100m world record is held by Usain Bolt. He ran the race in 9.58 seconds. The current women’s 100m world record is 10.49 seconds set by Florence Griffith-Joyner in 1998. Wikipedia has a handy page on the 100m men’s world record progression on this webpage for those interested in further reading. What is interesting is that since the IAAF official recording in 1964 the improvement in race time has barely been more than half a second. As mentioned above the women’s record has stood for an impressive 20 years.

Is it, therefore, possible that in both cases we have reached the limit of human achievement in this area? Is there a limit to how fast humans will ever be able to run and if so what is that limit? If gradually over time people keep running faster by small increments of microseconds is it possible that one day it will literally take someone 1 second to run 100 metres?

There are obviously a few challenges to the notion of there being a fastest man or woman in the world. Some examples of these being the technology available to measure this in the present day compared to past as well as the narrow sample size being that of all humans with athletic ability, that were fortunate enough to excel at athletics to the point where they could represent their countries at an IAAF event.

If we take the number of athletes who competed at the last summer Olympics as a fraction of the worlds population then we are talking about a sample size of less than 1000th of a percent of the world’s population (that’s very small). This basically means there could be a kid in a distant or remote part of the world who can run faster than any recorded time, or has the potential to but we will never know. Potentially because said kid is herding cattle somewhere or living their best life in an igloo somewhere remote and we will never hear of them or know of them.

One of the mental models I have grown up accepting is that if it has been done before then it can be done again. This makes a lot of sense when taking on a challenging task. It helps to believe it can be done. But what if…it can’t! What if it realistically can’t and will never be repeated? Using sprint records as an example, I repeat my earlier question of whether humans will keep shaving off small increments off these times forever? In that case the day has to come at some point in the future where people can run 100m in 1 second.

So my point today really is all about records and past human achievement. Are they pointless exercises in chasing the wind or are they useful landmarks that remind us of what has been achieved in the past? How do you leverage past achievements to inspire you in the future? And how do you let go of things that may have been exceptional, that you may be insanely proud of but will never be repeated again?

Can this actually be repeated? Or rather is this actually worth repeating? Or maybe is it even worth trying to beat it? Useful questions to ask next time you take on something new based on your history of completing it in the past.