History Main / TooFastToStop

* A random trainer in ''Anime/PokemonTheSeries'' thought it would be smart to enter ''[[Recap/PokemonS1E33TheFlamePokemonathon The Flame Pokemon-athon]] with an Electrode mount -- while the spherical Pokemon is genuinely fast when going downhill, it has no time to brake for any obstacles in its path.

* ''Anime/PrettyCure'': In ''Anime/SmilePreCure'', when Nao first becomes Cure March, she ends up learning (accidentally) she has super speed... by accidentally racing past Akaoni and slamming face first into a bridge truss. She ends up stepping out of the imprint she left rather unharmed and she was more confused than anything.

* In ''[[Manga/Reborn2004 Reborn!]]'', Tsuna suffers from this right off the bat when his gloves [[TookALevelInBadass updated to Ver. VR]]. This resulted in zooming past his ridiculously bloodthirsty oponent and running into cement-reinforced walls, therefore resulting in a [[CurbStompBattle curb stomp]].

* In Zone races in ''VideoGame/{{Wipeout}} HD'', your car gradually increases in speed (no brakes!) and continues to do so until you sustain too much damage and crash.

* In the ''WesternAnimation/PhineasAndFerb'' episode "[[Recap/PhineasAndFerbRunCandaceRun Run, Cadence, Run]]", the title characters invent supersonic shoes, and Candace decides to use a pair of those to be able to be at two places at practically the same time. Unfortunately, hers are "unstable prototypes", and she crashes on the memorial her boyfriend's family erected to a LongLostRelative. ''Twice''. [[spoiler:Fortunately, she accidentally finds the relative on the way to the second crash, and the Johnsons are too happy to be upset.]]

* In the first episode of ''Series/{{The Boys|2019}}'', Hughie and his girlfriend are talking about moving in together, when [[SuperSpeed A-Train]] turns her into a bloody pulp. He stops briefly to say he can't stop, and keeps running. The [[Fiction500 Vought corporation]] spins the incident so that the media will report it reported as a tragic accident, though in reality [[spoiler:A-train had been injecting himself with Compound-V, basically a superhero steroid, and couldn't slow down due to its effects.]]
* ''Series/DoctorWho'': In "The Pirate Planet", the Captain's henchmen make use of corridors that cancel out inertia, allowing them to travel long distances very fast and then stop suddenly without any injury. At one point the Doctor and Romana utilize one corridor, with the Captain's mooks on their heels. When they reach the end of the corridor, the Doctor sabotages the inertia neutralizer, sending their pursuers shooting out of the corridor where they land against a far wall hard enough to lose consciousness.

* ''Series/{{Elseworlds|2018}}'': Barry Allen and Oliver Queen swap lives, so Oliver has Flash's powers. Due to his inexperience, Oliver runs past a building he was going to, crashes into a wall when he tries to fight some robbers, and during an argument with Barry, he tries to charge at Barry at super speed, only for Barry to trip him.
* ''Franchise/TheFlash'':
** ''Series/{{The Flash|1990}}'' (1990):
*** The Flash himself has this problem in the pilot episode. He find out he has super-speed in a rather unexpected way: he starts chasing after a bus, then overtakes it, and soon enough he's hurtling through the city, unable to stop. He only stops when he hits a lake, and the water finally kills his momentum, 30 miles from where he started.
*** A scientist is trying to create a super-speedster, but his test subjects burn up when they accelerate, indicating that not only do they lack speed-resistant cells of the Flash, but the subjects can't slow down either, as only an idiot keeps running if they are overheating. He solves the problem by cloning the Flash.
** ''Series/{{The Flash|2014}}'': This happens in the 2014 series pilot as well. When Barry goes into an alley behind the police station, he unintentionally accelerates and runs headfirst into a police car's rear windshield (and he's perfectly fine afterwards, not even a cut). He then tests out his speed and runs into an open truck, which is, fortunately, full of soft things. When he does a test run at the abandoned Ferris Air airfield, he gets distracted by a memory and, when he snaps back, he's running straight at barrels full of water. He can't stop in time and slams into them, breaking his wrist (which heals in 3 hours).

* ''Series/{{Supergirl|2015}}'': In "World's Finest", a crossover with ''Series/{{The Flash|2014}}'', Barry uses an experimental device to enhance his speed. He runs fast enough to warp into Supergirl's universe by accident, then when he catches Kara who had been falling out a window, he accidentally runs them into the desert and sets Kara's shirt on fire from friction.
* ''Franchise/{{Superman}}'':
** In an episode of ''Series/LoisAndClark'', Clark is able to pull this off against a nemesis who has just stolen his superpowers by taunting her. Justified in that it was the very first time she ever used her newly acquired speed.
** ''Series/{{Smallville}}'':
*** In "Perry", Clark's powers start going haywire due to solar flares. When his mother calls him in for lunch, he tries to get back in the house, only to find himself at Lake Tahoe. When he tries to run back, he only makes it to Colorado Springs before his powers shut off, forcing him to take the bus home.
*** In "Transference", Clark mentions a time when he was 6. He was playing tag with his friends, but when he tried to run after them, he suddenly found himself all the way in the woods.
** On ''Series/SupermanAndLois'', Clark takes his teenaged son Jordan up to the Fortress for flying lessons. Jordan does pretty well with takeoffs, but he has trouble with slowing down. Flying back to the Kent farm in Kansas under his own power, he faceplants in the dirt when he lands whereas Clark lands neatly on his feet.
* In the ''Franchise/StarTrek'' series, this is {{Implied}} at least once to be why warp speed is generally discouraged inside a solar system. One miscalculation could cause a starship to warp right into a planet -- or, perhaps worse, the star that said planet orbits.

* Gauss from ''VideoGame/Warframe'' weaponizes this with his first ability ''Mach Rush'', where he simply starts sprinting really fast in one direction with very little turning control. The trope comes into play because slamming face first into a wall is the ''desired outcome'', as it creates an explosion at the point of impact while also charging up Gauss' kinetic batteries to power his other abilities.

* ''VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog'':
** It's actually possible to go fast enough that you could fall into a {{bottomless pit|s}} without realizing it right away. This gets even worse in the UsefulNotes/SegaGenesis games and the ''VideoGame/SonicAdvanceSeries'' when the camera often can't keep up. This even triggers a GameBreakingBug in [[VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog1 the original game]] where if the camera can't vertically keep up with you if you're falling or otherwise going down really quickly, it will sometimes think you fell into a pit.

[[folder:Web Comics]]

* Parodied in the ''WesternAnimation/{{Futurama}}'' episode "How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back", as a bureaucrat on an ultra-slow scooter can't stop from rolling into a stack of boxes and jostling them slightly.

** In the first season, The Flash was held back a lot by being tripped or clotheslined by objects that he had no excuse for not seeing coming or reacting to.
** In the finale of the Project Cadmus arc of ''WesternAnimation/JusticeLeagueUnlimited'', The Flash has to run so fast [[spoiler:to defeat the Luthor/Braniac merger]] that he ''warps out of reality for a moment''. When Hawkgirl pulls him back, he comments that if he ever runs so fast again, he may disappear for good.

** This seems to happen a lot with Rainbow Dash. It would explain where she got the [[InSeriesNickname nickname]] "Rainbow Crash". Inverted by the Sonic Rainboom which seems to allow her to turn on a dime at over Mach 1.
** Derpy Hooves is another pegasus that has trouble with decelerating before landing, as seen in "To Where and Back Again – Part 1". Part of TheKlutz package.

* ''WesternAnimation/PhineasAndFerb'': The title characters invent supersonic shoes and Candace decides to use a pair of those to be able to be at two places at practically the same time. Unfortunately, hers are "unstable prototypes" and she crashed on the memorial her boyfriend's family erected to a LongLostRelative. ''Twice''. [[spoiler:Fortunately, she accidentally found the relative on the way to the second crash and the Johnsons were too happy to be upset]].
* ''WesternAnimation/{{Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles|1987}}'': Michelangelo once beat a speedster mutant by dropping a bureau in his way mid-dash, leading to the FragileSpeedster crashing through it.
* There's an episode of ''WesternAnimation/TeenTitans'' in which Kid Flash is running away from Madam Rouge and ends up smashing into a brick wall at top speed. He acts dizzy and out of it for a few seconds until she catches up to him. In most cases, he's perfectly capable of stopping on a dime. This was mostly just him panicking because [[ImplacableMan nothing he's doing is even slowing Madam Rouge down]], [[OffscreenTeleportation and for some reason,]] she's perfectly able to keep up with a person who has ridiculous SuperSpeed.

* ''WesternAnimation/YoungJustice'': Kid Flash has this problem, running into a metal door because he didn't have enough space to stop. Though this might just have been because he was in a hallway. Luckily for him, his suit is visibly padded for sudden impacts.

When a character {{invoke|dTrope}}s Too Fast to Stop to cause someone else to crash, it's the WronskiFeint. This is one of the reasons why the DoorJudo works. Some {{Bullfight Boss}}es can be like this. Compare with InertiaIsACruelMistress and ComingInHot.

Also see the closely related WatchOutForThatTree

* In any game where a "speed up" or "(insert character name here) moves faster" cheat is discovered and used via a Gameshark, Action Replay or some other cheat device, the result is exactly what it says on the cheat and the character moves to '''incredible''' speeds more times than not. However A) some games do this a little ''too'' well, leading to the aforementioned example above of characters crashing into walls or leap off platforms to their dooms faster than you realize what the hell you're doing, B) it is kind-of-sort-of-not-really exactly what it says on the cheat where they ''are'' faster than normal, but not enough to, say, beat [[VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog Sonic]] in a footrace anytime soon, or C) it works well and you can still control the character in most cases, but the code caused ''everything else'' in the game to speed up just as much, making it harder than normal or just not worth using in the first place.

* Played for anything but laughs in ''ComicBook/TheBoys'', where Hughie's girlfriend is sideswiped by a speedster "hero" moving by too fast to see what he was doing. Hughie is left standing there with her arms up to the elbows for a while before he realizes what happened.

* In ''LightNovel/ThatTimeIGotReincarnatedAsASlime'', this is how [[CrouchingMoronHiddenBadass Gobta]] lost his tournament fight with [[FakeUltimateHero Masayuki]]. Gobta decided to go all-out and perform a FusionDance with [[NobleWolf Ranga]], becoming an extremely powerful WolfMan. Unfortunately, [[IncompletelyTrained this was the first time he actually used this form in a combat session]], and he was completely unprepared for the massive physical boost he got. He tried to rush Masayuki, but he went so fast that before his mind could catch up, he rocketed right past Masayuki and head-first into the reinforced stone of the arena walls, knocking himself out. It's only the fact that Masayuki willingly conceded that he "won" at all. Notably, this NegatedMomentOfAwesome pissed off [[OldMaster Hakurou]] and [[WorldsStrongestMan Milim Nava]] so much that the latter grabbed Gobta and Ranga after the fact to put them through the TrainingFromHell necessary to keep this from becoming a problem again with the former not lifting a finger to help.

* Saints in ''LightNovel/ACertainMagicalIndex'' can have this problem. They can run faster than the speed of sound, but at this speed it's difficult for them to stop or turn (and their reflexes aren't proportional to their speed either). A few people fighting Saints have exploited this.

* The 300cc and above cheat codes in ''VideoGame/MarioKartDS'' are exactly like this, to the point it's pretty hard to turn, and power slides actually slow you down... You also seem to take off when you hit a ramp while using it, which is never a good way to stay away from bottomless pits. There's also the Aero Glider, which has the effects of this trope not purely due to speed, but because it's stats for handling and drift are awful, so it's like driving on ice (and hitting all the walls in the process).

* ''Franchise/XMen'': [[ComicBook/WarrenWorthingtonIII Angel/Archangel]] often performs an aerial variant on his enemies. Specifically, Archangel isn't nearly as fast as most airborne people in the Franchise/MarvelUniverse, but he is ''far'' more agile, and sometimes it's hard to see the incoming wall with those big wings in your vision...

* In ''Webcomic/EverydayHeroes'', Dot Dash is normally in full control... unless something [[http://eheroes.smackjeeves.com/comics/1895750/follow-the-instructions/ knocks her off balance]].

** Speaking of ''Burnout'', in the [[VideoGame/Burnout3Takedown third game]] a more realistic example is the
Event type, which often put you in much faster cars than your current class on tracks you probably haven't raced on yet. The one in Europe in the ''UsefulNotes/FormulaOne'' car deserves special mention due to it dropping you in literally the fastest car in the game while you're still in the second-slowest class of cars.

* ''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIIIMorrowind'':
** The Scrolls of [[IcarusAllusion Icarian Flight]] are a jumping version of the trope. They allow you [[InASingleBound to leap incredible distances]], but [[JokeItem wear off]] after only a few seconds, meaning that by the time you land, you no longer have the ability to land safely. SPLAT. By landing in [[SoftWater deep enough water]], using a second scroll just before landing ([[TooAwesomeToUse you only get three]]), or by casting a Levitation/Slowfall spell, you can survive, making them NotCompletelyUseless. They even enter LethalJokeItem territory as they are a favorite of speedrunners and (when combined with a few exploits) allow completion of the game in a matter of minutes rather than dozens of hours.
** Enhancing your Speed attribute or Athletics skill to extreme levels will lead to this. Whether it's through the [[GameBreakingBug Alchemy abuse exploit]] or taking advantage of a LethalJokeItem like the Boots of Blinding Speed (which let you run incredibly fast, [[LiteralGenie but blind you]]), you can find yourself moving faster than the game can actually keep up with. A single button press to move can easily send you off a cliff or up against a wall, if not crash the game.

* ''WesternAnimation/MoonGirlAndDevilDinosaur2023'': Instantanegirl is a brief speedster supervillainess introduced in "Run the Rink", who tries to take down Moon Girl in a straight bull rush. Unfortunately for Instantanegirl's chances, Moon Girl simply moved to the side, allowing the incoming wall to take Instantanegirl out.

* In the cartoon of ''WesternAnimation/YoungJustice'', Kid Flash has this problem, running into a metal door because he didn't have enough space to stop. Though this might just have been because he was in a hallway.

** The speed cheat code in ''VideoGame/SpyroTheDragon'' increased Spyro's run speed to the point that ''charging'' was less than half as fast. Good luck making it around those narrow ledges.