Runners Should Distance 30 Feet

Runners can forget about the six foot margin for coronavirus safety. Because a runner’s wake can carry respiratory droplets much farther than the wakes of walkers (or standers), companion or competing runners directly behind a leader should hang back a good 30 feet. That’s the verdict of a computational model devised by a professor of civil engineering with dual appointments at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands and KU Leuven in Belgium. The New York Times reports on the study, warning that it has not yet been peer reviewed or otherwise verified. Still, its findings and recommendations, seen here in a series of animations, make sense. The Times reports that researchers found that droplets in the wake of air directly following a runner remained in a slipstream almost 30 feet long. For brisk walkers, the distance was about 15 feet. For runners, the safest and easiest recourse is to move to the side and out of the direct line of a slipstream. Or take the lead. A Q&A about study findings can be found here.