Dennis Crowley and myself spent all day doing 5 different Olympic Events: 100m freestyle, 100m dash, 110m hurdles, long jump and the rings (in gymnastics) and compared ourselves to Olympic athletes.
Olympic athletes make it look easy and these two make it look difficult. I particularly enjoyed Crowley's 100-meter swim/walk. Related: can you go from normal guy to Olympian with a few years of hard training? (via clusterflock)
Update: ESPN followed Kathryn Bertine -- "an average person with an athletic background" -- on her two-year quest to become an Olympic athlete. (thx gerard)
Update: The Mechanical Olympics project is leveraging the Amazon Mechanical Turk workforce to make videos of ordinary people competing in all the Olympic events. Here's an example video. (thx, michael)