Why is it that world records in virtually every test of human endurance keep edging downward? You might think it’s our ever-advancing knowledge of training, nutrition, hydration, recovery and so on, along with fancy technologies like cryosaunas. But all of this knowledge and technology is applied with equal enthusiasm to nonhuman sports like horse and dog racing. The financial stakes in horse racing, thanks to legalized betting, dwarf those in human endurance racing. And sure enough, for the first half of the twentieth century, Thoroughbreds and humans got faster at roughly similar rates. But
...more
