How fast is fast? Last week, we saw some REALLY fast movers.

As always, one Sunday in October is usually reserved for petrolheads to sit on the lounge chair in front of the television for about 6 and a ½ hours and ‘drive’ the 1000km of the Bathurst endurance race. For those not in the know (but how could you be in that category?), that seems like a really long time. It’s not. It goes fast, really fast. Just like the drivers and their machines. They move fast, really fast.

How fast, you may ask? Well, I believe that at least one of the vehicles was clocked at 301km/h on the fastest part of the track, toward the bottom of Conrod Straight. The lap record in a ‘Supercar’ now sits at a smidge over 2 minutes. To be exact, it’s 2:03.3783s, and all those little fractions of a second are really important. One lap of the mountain is 6.213km, and it’s very uphill and downhill if you’ve never watched. Some quick math will see an average speed on a lap of about 181km/h. That’s simply astonishing. I don’t think regular Joe would even know what it was like to travel at 181km/h in a car, let alone at the top speed of over 300 clicks. It won’t be long before those Supercars (Fords, Holdens and Nissans) can do it under 2 mins. Last year an Audi R8 cracked that barrier. That track out there at Bathurst is as smooth as baby’s bottom, if you’ll pardon the expression. It needs to be otherwise things might not be pretty. I guess we’ll never get to experience that smoothness on some of the roads in Orange (hello, Icely Road, I feel your pain J), maybe it’s kept full of pot holes to keep us to fifty – tricky.

We all know the fastest runner in history is Usain Bolt. He’s one of my sporting heroes. He runs the 100m at a warp-speed-like pace of over 37½ km/h for that distance. Whoosh. At the bit where he’s at his peak speed (about the 70m mark) he’s at about 46k’s, remember he’s on a standing start, so he’d get booked in a school zone if he ran through there at 3pm!! Slow down buddy when training on Byng or Kite street at that time. Usain can only keep that up for a very short distance though. Sooner or later, someone is going to better his mark of 9.58 seconds, but we must be getting close to the limit of what a human can achieve. Or so you’d think. Last weekend, Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya ran a full marathon in less than 2 hours. Sure, it was a bit of a setup to break the magical barrier – he had ‘pacers’, a laser pointer showing him how fast he needed to run, drinks fed to him on the run, and a special track and shoes to get the job done. But he did it. The first person. Like landing on Mars, they say. Ok … maths. He’s running for 2 solid hours at a speed of over 21km/h. Just for perspective (no arguments please), an average Joe/Joanne would run a ‘Parkrun’ at about 12km/h. This guy also holds the ‘real’ world marathon record (2:01.39) and he just smashed the 2 hour barrier in this unofficial way for giggles. If Usain could run a marathon at his speed, he’d knock it over in 1 hour and 7 minutes, so I guess were not done yet with the limits of endurance.

Just watching the lap record at Bathurst get smashed and then the marathon record get obliterated was enough to tire me out. Wow. Can’t wait until Sunday in October 2020 …