Marathon is too short for this, try for 24 hours...

Most folks can’t run 5k, let alone run for 24 hours.

Almost any human trained from a childhood would be able to do endurance hunting. Human endurance thanks to sweating and other traits is especially advantageous in hot climate: horses can't ourtun humans indefinitely as they overheat and can't cool down as effectively as humans, so eventually a trained human will catch up a horse (and eat it).

The key there being a trained human.

Doing it all your life since childhood counts as training for the sake of this argument.

I don’t know where you live but kids in the UK certainly don’t do much exercise through their childhood

They aren't expected to chase their food until in exhausts and can be easily killed and eaten.

That’s just deliberately missing the point.

It is actually remarkable how quickly we can go from “untrained, can barely go down to the shop on foot without a racing heart” to running being barely a problem (unfortunately to many — it really is hard to burn more energy than what you normally eat with even quite long runs, we are that energy efficient at that).

But the actual point is that people before the agricultural revolution was more than fit enough for that, and evolutionarily speaking that is no time at all, so.. yes, not even being trained from childhood, just deciding to train for that hard, most people could definitely do that.

If we take a person from a prehistorical hunter-gatherer society, you are either a trained and physically fit human, or a dead one.

If a horse run away to the point where you loose track of it, then it does not matter that you can run for a week

unless you have also trained in tracking?

And hunter gatherers even to this day are absolutely great at that, plus we could/can pass the knowledge down generations. We literally hunted down many of the megafauna to extinction.

I'm not sure about wild horses, but I have spent some time observing moose, which seem like a similar design. They don't seem to have much of a sense of purpose. So once scared into running, I don't think they would run very far before stopping to browse on some berries or nice grass.

People skilled in persistence hunting [0] track their prey even if it runs away from their sight. It still gets exhausted / overheated faster than the pursuing human hunters.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting

Most people's internal alarm for self preservation starts yelling long before endurance is truly tested. Nobody sprints for 24 hours, but I am certain that even the average couch potato can keep walking for 24 hours. They'd be hurting after, of course. From learning to jog, I can attest that it mostly about willpower, and I suppose, desperation at times.

In death marches, such as in WWII, even many starving prisoners, walking from dawn to dusk, with beatings, lasted for days on the trail.

The Americans and Filipinos on the Bataan Deathmarch are one example:

>The total distance marched from Mariveles to San Fernando and from the Capas Train Station to various camps was 65 miles long.

For the British there was The Burma Rail: >Camp Nong Pladuk was initially used as a transit camp from where the prisoners were transported or had to walk to work camps along the Burma Railway.

And of course, the Jews and other victims of the Nazis were often force marched.

My great great grandmother returned to her Volga German village in Russia after the rise of the Soviets, was arrested, sent to Siberia, where she worked in a camp for 7 years until her death from malnutrition and other neglects. And she was a grandmother at the time.

> Most people's internal alarm for self preservation starts yelling long before endurance is truly tested. Nobody sprints for 24 hours, but I am certain that even the average couch potato can keep walking for 24 hours. They'd be hurting after, of course. From learning to jog, I can attest that it mostly about willpower, and I suppose, desperation at times.

I'm not disputing this, but the response was that humans can't generally outrun a horse. Which is true. The average human will not be able to outrun the average horse.

> The average human will not be able to outrun the average horse.

The average human can't fix a toilet.

Because we specialise so much, average human can't do anything, but a trained human cam do everything.

Whereas a horse is mostly always a horse.

Google finds:

> How long does it take to train for marathon? Most marathon training plans range from 12 to 20 weeks. Beginning marathoners should aim to build their weekly mileage up to 50 miles over the four months leading up to race day.

So even untrained couch potatoes could learn in 4 month to run a marathon. (And indeed many do and test themselves that way.)

Google is wrong.

Training plans do last that long but jumping into a marathon training block from nothing is a very quick path to being injured.

Not everyone is obese american at verge of diabetes!

You don't need to be obese to not be capable of running very far.

No but we can chase them into traps we dug earlier and hunt them at our leisure

Basically we can. Not everyone, but you can imagine someone that relied on it for their survival definitely could. In these races the horse gets to subtract hold time. Take a look at this interview for example where one of the racers explains this, and won over a horse by an hour and 15 minutes: https://www.irunfar.com/catching-up-with-nick-coury .

It's also covered in this very nice episode of Radio Lab: https://radiolab.org/episodes/man-against-horse

In that race, Humans won 3 times, and in several other races the margin was in the low minutes. So I wouldn't say "generally" is true. And overall, it seems Humans benefit is to have more endurance than horses, so the longer the race, the more likely will they win.

If we take a look at the numbers of humans doing a 24-hour-run[1], and compare it with Endurance-Riding[2], then humans seem to be able to run far longer, at peak even significant longer. Though, to be fair, it's possible that the numbers are skewed for the horse's safety, and riders are not going all out till the possible mile.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_run [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_riding