Interestingly, it looks like the distance for this contest was shortened from a standard marathon to make it "more competitive". I wonder if anyone's explored the results at different distances? Perhaps the human would have a bigger advantage at longer distances. I'm not sure why they'd shorten the distance for the humans - a marathon is a standard distance that at least hundreds of thousands of people all over the world run just for fun. There even seems to be a pretty big community of ultra-marathoners that compete at distances several times greater than marathons, and over rough terrain too.
