Perhaps it’s not about outperforming others at all. Perhaps it’s about discovering where our own limits lie. That search might be at the heart of what it means to be human.
In this week’s episode of ThrowForward Thursday, Graeme Codrington explores how rapidly advancing humanoid robots are reshaping not only our understanding of automation and technology but also how we see ourselves.
And as a bonus, Graeme shares an update on his own journey – training toward one of the world’s toughest trail marathons, the Otter Challenge, taking place in October 2026.
One of the toughest marathons in the world is called the Otter Challenge. It runs across the 42.2 km of the most remarkable trail in the world. It’s called the Otter Trail. It normally takes five days for hikers to hike the complete trail, with a number of river crossings and an incredible amount of up and down, different mountain slopes, and scrambling up really treacherous paths.
But once a year, the Otter Challenge opens up to a few crazy trail runners who attempt to run the trail, not just in one day. The record time is a remarkable four hours over this amazing terrain.
I am also a trail runner, and I have set out to run the Otter Challenge, not in four hours. They give you a slightly more generous this time allocation if you’re a little bit older and slower like I am.
But there is a chance that some of the robots that have now been developed by companies as different as Boston Dynamics to Tesla and the remarkable Humanoid robots would be able to run this Otter challenge in, say, 2 hours and completely obliterate anything that human beings could do.
Following on from last week’s ThrowForward Thursday, where we talked about the Enhanced Games and Bionic Olympics, I had a personal thought to myself. If a robot could run this trail marathon in two hours, what’s the point of human beings even competing anymore? I mean, why don’t we just give up, right? There’s no ways that we could beat the robots.
But then again, I thought, there’s no ways I’m ever going to run the personal best, what they call the fastest known time on this trail run. That’s not the reason I run it. In fact, the first time I ran it, I came stone last and missed the cut off by a few minutes.
And that’s why I’m going back this year, not to beat anybody else, just to beat myself, to see if I can get in under that time limit, to see if I can actually endure this race. It’s hours on my feet, it’s the most difficult, most painful thing I’ve ever done. And I’m going to do it again, not because I can do it better than other people or because I’ll only do it if I am better than others, but to test the limits of my own body. And to be honest, my own brain, I think even more than the body.
It doesn’t matter what robots can do, it doesn’t matter if machines can think faster than we can and robots can lift things that are heavier than we can lift and run and move faster than we can move. We are still human and part of what makes us human is our desire to push ourselves, to find out where our own limits are, and to push ourselves beyond those limits.
I suppose robots could be programmed to do that, but I don’t think that they will ever gain what we would call in that moment, the human spirit. And whether it’s about survival or love, or whether it’s about beauty and passion, or it’s about sorrow and despair, I think part of what makes us human is that we never really get to the depths of who we are and what we are really capable of and what we believe we can become, which is always more than we are right now.
I think as we look into the future, we don’t need to be scared of the robots taking over, because until robots get that desire to push themselves and be more than they were programmed to be, I think that humans will always have an edge. And I think you might discover that humans will always be able to outdo what the robots can do. In the end, we will endure.
That’s what I think. But hey, follow my progress on my socials and see how I do at the Giants Cup warmup and then at the Otter Challenge later in October this year. We’ll see how far this old body can go and see if I change my mind about whether we might always be just a little bit more than the robots might ever be.
Thanks for joining me in the ThrowForward Thursday studio. A little bit philosophical today but hopefully inspiring you to be the best human that you can be.
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Graeme speaks to 100,000+ people a year in 150+ countries and is a 2× TEDx speaker and best-selling author. He’s also ranked #17 in the Global Gurus “Top 30 Futurist Professionals” for 2026.
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