[whywhywouldyou]

So what? These people will no longer be your run of the mill "runner". They will be augmented, much the way we're augmented by using bicycles and skis, etc.

The original claim that if someone were to be able to move at these speeds that they would suddenly need to be heavily bogged down in safety gear is flat out ridiculous. Comparing it to other sports where we move at similar speeds should be more than enough evidence of that.

[Retric]

People do ski faster than that but low friction means slower deceleration which is a huge reason it’s even possible to learn reasonably safely. This applies to basically all high speed winter sports and is under appreciated by most viewers. Similarly landing from a jump or fall on a hill the force vectors mean people are mostly sliding on the surface resulting in significantly less forceful impacts.

Biking at 45-48 MPH is rare, dangerous, and free of tripping hazards which I think are a much larger concern. Further, people also add extra protection for downhill MTB such as a back protector, thick gloves, goggles, helmets with neckbrace, padded clothing, and knee pads. Yet it also has similar benefits from being on steep hills.

[Lio]

> Biking at 45-48 MPH is rare, dangerous,

Not sure where you get that from. Amateur road cyclists can pretty easily reach 50MPH given a long enough hill and do so pretty uneventfully.

That's dressed in just shorts, jersey, helmet and fingerless gloves.

A professional racing cyclist could easily break 60MPH on closed roads and even 80MPH on occasion.

For someone like Tom Pidcock who knows[1]. In the linked video he's topping out at about 100kph (60mph) but it's worth noting that that's without being allowed to sit on the top tube of this bike. They banned that (even though it wasn't linked to any crashes).

The bike manufactures will eventually just add dropper posts to all pro road bikes and those speeds will go up again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f4Pp4oYh28

[lloeki]

> Biking at 45-48 MPH is rare, dangerous, and free of tripping hazards which I think are a much larger concern

Two decades ago I was doing downhill MTB. On a road section it was quite frequent for me to reach those speeds†; and that's with a MTB (tuned to that end), friends†† with road bikes reached these speeds with ease, some of them regularly hit 80-90kph on specific sections.

One of the wide hairpin turns happened to be littered with gravel, and as I was banking for the turn the bike wheels started zipping off laterally as it the ground was ice, propelling both of us sideways at full speed towards the downward outer bank.

Luckily a) I had slowed down to approach the turn so I was going more like 45-50kph and b) the bike had much less ground grip than my body so it flied away while body-ground friction (painfully) slowed me down to a stop before I hit any tree or rock down the bank. Sheer luck had it that I walked away from the event with only a few bruises and a lot of scratches (one of my elbows still bears burn scars)

† Top recorded speed ever was 74 kph, at which point gear ratio was such that `cat pedalling > /dev/null`

†† c.a 1995-1999 they biked regularly with the then young Julien Absalon (I only biked with him once): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julien_Absalon.