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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.