Sir, – As a contemporary of Conor Pope's, and sharing his tendency to rotate between exercises in a faddish way, I can relate fully to his experience of trying to run fast on a treadmill ("At 19km/h, I have never felt less like an athlete", Health + Family, February 25th). Most such machines have a top speed of 20 km/h and it is certainly humbling to consider that competitive marathon running, for many years, has broadly entailed maintaining that speed for over two hours.
However, I’ve always known that those athletes were in a separate stratosphere of physical giftedness. Conversely, reading that a running speed of over 33 km/h has been recorded by Wayne Rooney during a game – yes, that Wayne Rooney – seems to me to put any efforts us amateurs can make at running in the ha’penny place. – Yours, etc,
BRIAN O’BRIEN,
Kinsale,
Co Cork.