Answering the important questions since 2003

Today I needed to know which is faster, a human or a badger? Specifically, can a teenage girl wearing two skirts and carrying a bludgeon made out of a pine branch outrun a badger while in a maze? Surprisingly you can't just Google up the answer to that question.

Figuring out the land speed of unladen badger is not that hard.

http://www.badgerland.co.uk/education/projectideas/age12to16/trivia.html

How fast can a badger run?

Up to 25 to 30 km per hour for short distances

That's pretty straightforward.

But when you get to the humans it's trickier. Quite a few sites insist on giving the data in miles per hour, which makes a comparison a little harder and is kind of annoying.

But what's worse is that they give data for the fastest human, running very short distances. I want to know about the average person. My character is not famous for her sprinting abilities. Now she is scared and motivated by fear and fueled by epinephrine but the badger is fueled by wicked intentions so that kind of balances things out.

This site was the most helpful:

http://www.knowledgenews.net/moxie/todaysknowledge/the-need-for-speed.shtml

Ask a man to actually run a mile, and the best he can manage is about 16 miles per hour (26 km/h), slower than the slowest dragonfly.

That settles it. Badger certainly can outrun a human, which is bad news for my poor character.