A woman who outruns men, 200 miles at a time
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
More insights on this topic can be found here:
https://trailrunnermag.com/people/is-women-winning-ultras-ov...
Efficiency is the most important factor.
It will be interesting to see what this does to the sport, if it ends up becoming as much about performing for days without sleep as being physically capable of running 200+ miles.
It's just not something the competition has been doing, and I suspect it's largely out of self-preservation rather than a lack of ability. Sleep deprivation is not particularly good for the brain.
Now that Courtney has demonstrated this strategy, and how impossible it is for even the fastest of distance runners to beat it if they sleep, I expect ultramarathons to become a bunch of sleep-stumblers after the first day in the future.
Which makes it not really about distance running anymore. It's more like a run followed by a long tired hallucination-ridden hike.
It should probably be a separate class.
Personally I respect the 'purity' and simplicity of get from here to there on foot as fast as possible.
http://www.iau-ultramarathon.org/images/file/Records/2017_20...
If 10 hours is 20 miles that's 2 mph for the last 10 miles. First, that's not running, that's not even walking. I walk about 3.5 mph. So either the competitor spent a couple hours in bed or it doesn't check out at all.
It'd also mean the competitor ran at 3.75 mph for the first 218 miles. Did they lose almost half the speed for the last 20 miles?
She was also resting, but on average she stopped fewer times than anybody else in the race.
Also, Moab is not like a marathon, it's rough terrain, so you can't possibly run with full force, like on a marathon flat surface.
Look at the terrain they're running on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YseTVpI4R5U
EDIT: Although gp did say it would be "helpful." So, yeah, I don't know what they meant by that, but this is my take on it anyhow.
As an example consider the LZR swimsuit [1] by Speedo. In the Beijing Olympics 23 of 25 world records broken were done by swimmers wearing an LZR suit. It had such a huge impact on swimming that the suit is now banned, along with possible derivatives of it. You might expect it's some amazing insta-swimmer, but it's just a regular swimsuit that's nicely engineered resulting in about a quarter less drag than their previous swimsuit. But these changes alone enabled swimmers to shave an average of about 2% off their lap times, which was way more than enough to just destroy just about all previous records.
The ratios of your hips, legs, weight distributions, etc all are vastly different between men and women. And different, though less so, between races. Even consider all the physical differences implied by simply having breasts. Occasionally you'll find a genetic outlier, but in cases where the normal distribution tends to overlap strongly with the ideal performance distribution you're going to get a landslide of results. For instance Kenya makes up a tiny chunk of the world's population, but dominates pretty much all marathon running competitions. Even more interesting is it's not just Kenyans, but a tiny ethnic minority within Kenya that's doing this dominating. Some 0.06% of the world's population ends up dominating marathon racing. Most tellingly, Kenya was basically a nonplayer in these events until cultural changes in the 80s started bringing Kenya (and other East African nations) up to the standards of the west in terms of nutrition and general technology. There was a great article on this all a while back [2].
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZR_Racer
[2] - https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/wh...
Funny that you are using the business example just assuming that they must be equal. There is no data that I know of to support this.
1. It can be reasonably agreed that (as of 2018) becoming a billionaire with a successful (profitable; influential) business empire is the peak of business success.
2. Women encounter more prejudice/sexism in business than men.
3. Becoming a self-made billionaire is more challenging as a female than a male.
4. There are both male and female self-made billionaires.
The conclusion is that women can be at least as competent as men in business.
Let's assume that 1) is a good metric. Then 2) needs to be argued for and quantified. 3) follows from the (missing) quantification of 2, plus some other parameter for its impact. 4) Also needs to be numerically quantified: what's the ratio between male and female billionaires?
So we're back at square one: you believe your parameters to be whatever they need to be to make your conclusion true. That doesn't prove much, does it?
We could introduce a general rule where if a biological trait has above a statistical threshold of being beneficial, then the sport should split based on that trait. I would love see a statistician explore that and paint us a picture of how the most popular sports would look like.
I think in this particular case it's OK to write "sex differences".
I think that new sports that don’t have biological biases based on sex or gender will be interesting mainly because the competitor base is doubled and the fan base is larger. So having more potential competitors should lead to better contests and having different events merged into a single means more viewers per events.
For example, esports not having gender categories is a positive. Or this type of endurance running is cool. Although I don’t expect there are too many viewers for a 67 hour event, having an event that allows people regardless of sex means more events possible.
Non-segregated sports that don't rely on physical strength, speed, etc still tend to be almost exclusively men in the extreme corner of the bell curve that professional athletes occupy, so getting rid of gender segregation would result in fewer professional women in sports.
Now I'm sure not everyone thinks that way.
Certainly kids who actually engage in sport will realize this.
Maybe the question, if you think gender is really important for role modeling, is what other physical characteristics would be useful to segregate sports by. I think segregating by sex is valuable when there are sex biases (I don’t know of many gender biases in sports), but segregating to increase participation would be something to think about.