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Elite Running Research Paper

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Introduction:
For my Internal Assessment, I am going to investigate the characteristics of elite runners. As a high school track and field and cross country athlete, I am amazed by the abilities of elite runners, who seem to glide through the air effortlessly. By researching the characteristics of their running, I believe that I can become a better runner by implementing some of their mechanics. In theory, running may seem like a simple motion. However, maintaining proper form while physically exerting every muscle in your lower body is no simple task. Every four years, the best athletes from around the globe come together to compete in the Summer Olympic Games. Earlier this year, athletes from just under 200 countries competed in track and …show more content…

Cadence is the number of steps taken per minute, and stride length is the distance traveled with each step. Hence cadence multiplied by stride length is the distance traveled per minute. To find speed, the distance traveled per second, the product of cadence and stride length is divided by sixty. Because logically, there are sixty seconds in a minute. When speed is represented with v,Cadence with c, and Stride Length with l, this relationship is modeled with the equation: v=cl60 To solve for stride length, this formula can be rewritten as: l=60vc Approximate cadences were obtained by counting the number of steps each athlete took. For races longer than two minutes, the cadence was found by averaging the number of steps taken during two one minute intervals. For shorter races, the cadence of each athlete was extrapolated.
During Mohamed Farah’s performance in the 10,000m finals, his cadence was approximately 204 and his speed was6.15 ms-1. Since stride length is the only unknown variable, its value can be calculated using the formula for stride …show more content…

To start, I explored the relationship that existed between distance and speed.The speeds of the top three male and female athletes at each distance have been plotted. For both men and women, there is an inverse exponential relationship between the speed of the athlete and the event distance. This trend shows a logical relationship because as the distance of a race increases, the athletes are going to be slower because running for a longer amount of time requires energy to be conserved.

In order to develop an equation which represents this relationship, I am going to graph the speed of each athlete against the log of their distance. Because this is an exponential relationship, the log of x is proportional to speed. This means that when log of distance is plotted along the x axis, a linear trend will be produced. Once these points are plotted, I will calculate a regression line using linear regression. Once this equation is found, log x can be substituted into the equation for the value of x, this new equation would be the regression line for the correlation between speed and

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