Item — HN Reader

> Cheetahs are very fast, but humans have way more endurance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon

> The Man versus Horse Marathon is an annual race over 21 miles (34 km), where runners compete against riders on horseback through a mix of road, trail and mountainous terrain. The race, which is a shorter distance than an official marathon road race, takes place in the Welsh town of Llanwrtyd Wells every June.

> ...

> The event started in 1980, when local landlord Gordon Green overheard a discussion between two men in his pub, the Neuadd Arms. One man suggested that over a significant distance across country, man was equal to any horse. Green decided that the challenge should be tested in full public view, and organised the first event.

While the horses had a string of wins from 2008 to 2019, 2022 to 2025 had three wins for humans and one win for a horse.

The next race event: https://www.green-events.co.uk/man-v-horse

3 comments

The Man vs Horse marathon is interesting but in a real race we have no actual chance of winning.

There are horse endurance races where the winner arrived in 7,5 hours after 160km[1]. That's a sub 2-hours marathon almost 4 times in a row (not to mention with a guy on your back).

[1] https://eatnstays.com/uaes-almazrouei-wins-almutadil-cup-at-...

“in a real race we have no actual chance of winning” is an absolutely wild thing to say in response to a link to a real race in which the human has won the last few years in a row.

The race is pretty much designed to be a difficult for horses as possible to give humans a chance. Except for the parts that are extremely difficult for horses, horses steamroll the human competitors.

https://youtu.be/FY9Ee6-CIFM?t=342

I think it implies that the best competitors are not participating.

Neither are the best humans in that particular race.

Fair, but if you had a cycle vs foot race where one wasn't consistently on top, you'd probably say it wasn't a real competition.

That time doesn't include most of the 40-50 minutes the horse must rest between laps. The total time from start to finish was just over 11 hours.

https://www.enduranceonline.it/live/cat/V.php?gara_id=1911&v...

Wow, seems surprisingly balanced. I would guess that if it was 50% longer distance than humans would win reliably, and 50% shorter would allow the horses to win?

Think it's more to do with hilly, wooded courses unfavourable to horses and a requirement that the horse's heart rate remain below a certain threshold when inspected by a vet in the middle and end of a course, whereas the leading humans are maxing out their efforts

I don't think the Mongol cavalry would lose races to humans over any distance of steppe

To be fair you can run a horse to death in a race, a human however isn't likely to die from running a race even to their physical limits.

Yeah I think on say, a proper road the horse would win at any distance.

the road adds some infrastructure - i think at that point the person should get a bike?

1990: For a few joyous years there was the Man v Horse v Bike competition in Mid-Wales - https://youtu.be/vFlglZUIKO8

Well that’s just not fair. Even the fastest human on earth can’t be expected to keep up with a horse riding a bike.

There's probably some upper limit to it, i am not sure a horse could live through the ultra marathon moab race in the western us.

The weather conditions also impact it significantly.

https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/hu...

> Lobb’s victory came on a hot day, as did Florian Holzinger’s subsequent victory in 2007—a significant detail, according to a new study in the journal Experimental Physiology from Lewis Halsey of the University of Roehampton in Britain and Caleb Bryce of the Botswana Predator Conservation Trust. Halsey and Bryce gathered historical data from three endurance races that pit humans against horses, including the Man Versus Horse Marathon, to test the idea that humans are uniquely adapted to run for long distances in hot weather.

> This idea has been around since the 1980s, and it gained prominence when Harvard anthropologist Daniel Lieberman and University of Utah biologist Dennis Bramble published a 2004 Nature paper hypothesizing that running had “substantially shaped human evolution.” They argued that our ability to keep running at a moderate pace even on hot days allowed us to run prey like kudu to exhaustion or outcompete other animals in the race to scavenge carcasses left by other large predators.

There's a plot with the analysis of the Old Dominion with weather stations in there that show a steeper negative slope for horses compared to the humans.

> Overall, for every increase of 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), the horses slowed down by about 1 percent—or 0.07 miles per hour, to be precise. The humans, on the other hand, slowed down by just 0.04 miles per hour for each extra degree of heat. That 36 percent advantage for the humans was statistically significant.

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For the Man vs Horse, the weather conditions ("Hot", "Rain/sun/windy" - not exact values)... the entry for 2022 was the human winning by 1:51 on a warm day, and 2023 was a human wining by 9:44 on a sweltering day.

There was a great radiolab episode about it a few years ago but I remember it being in Utah not UK

https://radiolab.org/podcast/man-against-horse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon

> ... There are other Man versus Horse races — in Scotland based at Dores, near Loch Ness, in Central North Island, New Zealand and in the U.S. city of Prescott, Arizona.

And the Arizona race page: https://managainsthorse.com