Background Research

    To search for information concerning our study and to see if any previous studies had been conducted on a related subject, we went to google.com and searched for key words “height vs speed running”.  We found about 304,000 results, though the vast majority was unrelated.  One beneficial source was a forum where people could ask scientists questions.  The URL for this site is http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/gen06/gen06295.htm.

    The question discussed was “Do taller people run faster than shorter people?  I need information (why, how) about this topic.”.  Two scientists responded to this question.  The first expressed his personal belief that height was a small factor in how fast a person could run.  He continued to say that he assumed extremely short and extremely tall people ran slower than those of a more average height.  Very short or very tall people experience a lack of balance in physical qualities in terms of running: short runners will have faster stride paces, but shorter strides; taller runners will have long strides, but a slower stride pace.  The second scientist explained that there are three key factors that are incorporated into runner: strength, endurance, and flexibility.  He said that height did play a role in stride length, which could in turn, lead to speed in running.  However, he noted that flexibility had an even greater role in stride length.  Between two people of similar height, the more limber one will have a greater stride length due to the ability to stretch his or her legs farther and easier.  The scientist did state that height is more of a “blessing” in that, while a flexible, but short runner cannot simple grow taller, a tall, but less limber runner can stretch daily to increase flexibility.  From this source, we discovered, or rather, justified that height is not the sole factor in the speed of a runner.  Thus, our study may not reveal a perfectly linear relationship between height and speed.

 

    We also found a site that had an extensive study analyzing the relationship between sprinting speed and mass and stature.  The URL for this source is: http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/content/full/208/14/2625 This study was more professional than ours and took into consideration few extra factors, such as mass.  The study stated that body sizes for humans and other mammalian runners vary with specific performance needs.  The generalization was made that sprinters are more muscular while longer distance runners tend to be less massive.  Those conducting the study hypothesized that “the greater body masses of faster specialists are directly related to the greater ground support forces required to attain faster running speeds.”.  They gathered mean values for mass, stature, and speed of 45 top world runners, both male and female specialists.  They found a relationship between mass, stature, and event-specific ground support force requirements, expressed by the formula:

body mass (kg) = mass-specific force x (stature^2) (m) x constant

They discovered an R^2 value of 0.97, indicating a very strong linear relationship.

We did find many results on our Google search; however, none were relevant to our study.  Most of the results were opinions or did not mention any type of correlation between height and speed. Therefore, these results were disregarded.