speed - How fast would someone have to run to run over water?

I was thinking about Flash, the superhero, or the little boy in the Incredibles.

There is one Yahoo answer that doesn't answer a lot. Especially, I don't think surface tension would help a lot for a human to run over water, I think one would have to build on the inertial effect of the water.

There is one empirical approach based on figuring out the speed at which bare-footed water skiing is done, but I wasn't able to find a decent number. Still the difference may be that a hypothetical runner would have to propulse herself over the water, which may or may not make the thing more difficult.

Hence, I raise the question here.

Answer

Unsurprisingly this has been the subject of several scientific papers. In particular Google for papers by J. W. Glasheen and T. A. McMahon. They studied the basilisk lizard, but their results can be extrapolated to humans. It's debatable how reliable such a large extrapolation is, but the result is that the required speed is so far beyond human ability that we can safely conclude it's impossible without some artificial aid.

There's a summary of the results from the papers in this article and a more general summary here. The conclusions are that you have to run at a speed of 20-30m/sec, which doesn't sound too bad, but you'd need to generate a mechanical power of 12kW to do it. Trained athletes can just about manage half a kW, and most of us would struggle to generate 200W.