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Walking, Running, And Resting Under Time, Distance And Average Speed Constraints: Optimality Of Walk-Run-Rest Mixtures, Leroy L. Long Iii, Manoj Srinivasan

Publications

On a treadmill, humans switch from walking to running beyond a characteristic transition speed. Here, we study human choice between walking and running in a more ecological (non-treadmill) setting. We asked subjects to travel a given distance overground in a given allowed time duration. During this task, the subjects carried, and could look at, a stop-watch that counted down to zero. As expected, if the total time available were large, humans walk the whole distance. If the time available were small, humans mostly run. For an intermediate total time, humans often use a mixture of walking at a slow speed …