What makes running so much less energy-efficient than bicycling?

Most people can ride 10 km on their bike. However, running 10 km is a lot harder to do. Why?

According to the law of conservation of energy, bicycling should be more intensive because you have to move a higher mass, requiring more kinetic energy to reach a certain speed. But the opposite is true.

So, to fulfill this law, running must generate more heat. Why does it?

Some things I can think of as (partial) answers:

• You use more muscles to run.



• While running, you have more friction with the ground; continuously pouncing it dissipates energy to it.


• While you move your body at a slow speed, you need to move your arms and legs alternately at higher and lower speeds.

Answer

One word: inertia. When you're riding a bike on a level gradient you just need to give it a push to get going, then you can coast for quite a while before friction and air resistance slow you down. The human body doesn't have wheels that can store kinetic energy, so while running you have to give a good kick to get going, and then another kick to keep going on the next step, and so on. When hills are involved the difference is even more pronounced, since we run downhill the same way we do on the level, by continually pushing ourselves forward; whereas on a bicycle you can take advantage of the slope and just coast down it.

I suspect that raising and lowering your centre of mass isn't as inefficient as the other answers have suggested. This is because your legs are springy, so at least to some extent you're just converting energy back and forth between gravitational potential and the spring force in your legs. Humans are possibly the most efficient long-distance runners in the animal kingdom. There is a school of thought that says the reason we are bipeds is that we evolved as endurance hunters, chasing our prey until it collapsed from exhaustion rather than trying to outrun it over short distances. Whether that's true or not, we probably wouldn't do all that bouncing up and down if there wasn't a good reason for it.

You might ask why, if using wheels is so much more efficient, didn't we evolve that instead? I don't know, but it seems no animal has been able to evolve wheeled locomotion.