Introduction
A common question in any field of endeavor is ‘is this good?’ So, what is considered ‘fast’ when it comes to sprinting?
Fast sprinting is anything above ~21km/hr, since the average human sprinting speed is roughly 21km/hr.
Before we jump into how this figure was determined, let’s considered the fastest people in the world to provide us with some context.
What is the Fastest a Human can Sprint?
The fastest person who has ever (probably….) existed is Usain Bolt. When Usain Bolt ran his world record time of 9.58, he achieved a top speed of 44.72km/h (27.78mph), which he ran during the 60m-80m split of the race.
Tyson Gay actually ran slightly faster than this, however that was in a race where the tailwind was too high for the record to count (for those unaware, if the tailwind measured during a race is over +2.0 m/s, then those races are excluded from record consideration).
So, at least now, it seems that the fastest a human can sprint is ~44.7km/hr. Now let’s consider the speed of some athletes.
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How Fast is the Average Athlete?
Let’s now consider the average speed of athletes. An article I read while researching this topic suggested that the average athlete speed is 24km/hr, which is absolute madness – it is certainly not that low.
Looking at soccer/football players, every season the top speed recorded for top professional football players is around 35-37km/hr (for example, see here and here).
Looking at the literature. The average speed of football players seems to be somewhere in the region of ~30km/hr (see this study here).
“Finally, as an average for all teams, players’ peak running speeds remained stable at ~30.7 ± 0.6 km/h throughout the whole season.”
So, using football players as the model of an ‘average athlete’ which I think is fair (on average, rugby, NFL, and track and field athletes will be faster that footballers while golfers, gymnasts and archers will on average be slower), then we can conclude that the average athlete top speed is around 30km/hr.
So, what would be considered a fast sprinting speed for a professional athlete? Anything over 30km/hr would be considered good or fast.
Now that we have considered the fastest humans, as well as athletes, what about the average person?
What is the Average Person’s Sprinting Speed?
Answering this question will let us answer the question of what would be considered fast sprinting. However, unfortunately there really isn’t too much data on this topic because ‘average’ people are not having their sprinting speeds tested in a controlled environment.
In light of this absence of research, we will conduct a scientifically valid study ourselves – studying BuzzFeed’s YouTube videos.
In this video, several people – let’s say representing the average population – run a very dodgy 100m (sometimes while running in a suit…). I say that the test is dodgy because the runners have to run around a corner as they complete the 100m run, which of course would slow them down.
The 100m times of these ‘average’ people are 23s, 30.2s, 19.4s, 14.7s, 18.9s.
Doing some arbitrary corrections based on the corner being there and the fact that they ran the race in bad conditions, and then taking the average, we get a time of ~ 19 seconds.
Converting this to a top speed, I would very roughly estimate that therefore the average person has a top speed of ~21km/hr.
Considering that the average professional football has a top speed of ~30km/hr, this seems reasonable.
Elephant in the Room
Let’s address the elephant in the room. The question of ‘is this good?’ makes no sense.
Whatever is defined as ‘good’ is relative to a population. What I’ve tried to do here is come up with an extremely rough estimate for an average human (yes, even including 85-year-old grandmas) that seems reasonable to me – which most people probably do not care about.
Usually people wish to compare themselves to people of the same gender, similar age etc… for which there are many, many categories (sorry, but I won’t be able to address ”is a 14.72s 100m good for a 13 year old male?” for example).
Another issue related to this topic is the lack of standardization of speed measurements. When we are measuring someone’s top speed, even fractions of a second can make a huge distance. Compare this to measuring someone’s mile time – the error introduced by the person pressing the stopwatch 0.5 seconds late is not too great for example; this is not the case in sprinting.
For example, most footballer’s top speeds are calculated using GPS technology. This measurement methodology is far less accurate than the systems used to measure Bolt’s speed when he was racing.
So, what is considered fast sprinting depends on who you ask, and what systems you are using to measure that speed.
Even with the rough average human speed I calculated of around 21km/hr, this is most likely quite inaccurate. However, what I can say that is that if you can run faster than 25km/hr, then you are most definitely faster than the average person. Of course, for the type of person who is reading this article, that is still probably very slow….
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Conclusion
What is considered fast sprinting?
Fastest Person on Earth – 44.72km/h (27.78mph)
Average Professional Athlete – 30km/hr (18.75mph)
Average Person – 21km/hr (13.13mph)
As I explained, the question of what is considered ‘fast’ or what is considered ‘good’ is very flawed. However, hopefully this article has still given a good idea of what different speeds are achieved by different athletes and populations.
Do you know what your top speed is? Leave a comment below as I’d love to know!
Do you want to get faster? Check out this article here where I talk about the best exercise to improve your acceleration speed.
