Your ordinary healthy housecat, on the other hand, can dash at an incredible pace of roughly 30 mph with no training, conditioning, stretching, or carb loading. All the cat would need for such an athletic accomplishment is a little incentive, such as escaping prey in front of her or a large dog pursuing her. Cats are naturally built for speed and stealth. They have four legs instead of two, which allows them to jump high, climb trees, and traverse rough terrain with ease. Their small size, however, does limit what they can do physically. Cats are not designed to be marathon runners or swimmers. However, their ability to use their brains while running at full tilt enables them to outrun most dogs, who are slower than they look. This article will discuss how fast cats are when running. The fastest cat recorded running a half-mile was 11 seconds flat by our friend Fritz the Cat. He also held the record for farthest until recently when he was beaten by a female cat named Jazz who covered 1 mile in 15 minutes. This means that if Fritz ran again today he could possibly break the record again. Fritz was born in 1999 and weighed about 3 pounds, so he was very underweight. This probably explains why his time is so low compared to other cats who have been recorded running.