A footrace, but the objective is to run as far as possible in a fixed amount of time rather than speeding through a fixed distance. The catch is that the time limit is drawn randomly at the start of the race, so you cannot strategize around it being a sprint or distance event.

I think a good choice of distribution would be an log-normal distribution with a mean of around four or five minutes and a fairly high variance. Perhaps we could clamp the maximum time at eight hours, out of respect for the athletes’ work-life balance.

I ran (ha) this idea by a friend who is a competitive marathoner and he said, “That sounds like hell.” This makes me think I am really onto something, because many popular sports sound like hell to those who are not yet good at them.