When Women Outrun Men
thewalrus.ca
thewalrus.ca
I think all of the women mentioned in the article have run at Western States 100, where there are always a decent number of the best men and women (but never as many as want to go, because it's a lottery system with limited spots for elites). It is extremely unlikely a woman will ever win that race. The women's course record (by Ellie Greenwood, one of the women mentioned in the linked article) is 16:47, which is over two hours slower than the men's course record, and in that record-setting run in 2012 she finished the race in 14th place overall. That's an excellent run, even for a male, but she is nowhere near as strong a runner as the best men.
I think all these women are quite aware that they're not at the level of the best men; they're not delusional. It's the media that likes to sensationalize things when they see a woman win a race outright. The media doesn't understand that the fields in these races are wildly uneven; there's a limited number of races where substantial numbers of the best runners show up.
I was curious about this so I looked at the percentiles for the Boston Marathon since the data is readily available.
Roughly speaking, the top 1% of women times lines up with top 10% for men so the data backs up your statement. After that, there's a pretty consistent 20% difference.
% Male Female
0.00 02:09 02:21
0.01 02:38 03:03
0.10 03:00 03:27
0.20 03:12 03:37
0.30 03:22 03:45
0.40 03:31 03:53
0.50 03:41 04:00
0.60 03:51 04:10
0.70 04:04 04:22
0.80 04:22 04:39
0.90 04:50 05:05
0.99 05:50 05:56
1.00 07:58 07:19
'After scouring the results of nearly 100,000 marathon finishers, Sandra Hunter, a professor of exercise science at Wisconsin’s Marquette University, made an interesting—if not intuitive—find. The more men there are in a race relative to the amount of women, the bigger the performance gap between those genders. “If you had one female for every twenty men, the likelihood that that female is going to be the best . . . compared with the best male in that age group is pretty small,” says Hunter.'
Which suggests it has a lot more to do with the statistics of outliers than anything else. Elite performance is signal (training!) plus noise (daily variation, environmental variance, Athena rooting for you, etc), which can overwhelm the signal on any given day. But each participant is also a random draw on the /signal/ variable as well. Get more people in the event, and you get more draws on the signal variable. Get more people on race day, and you get more chances for outliers on the noise variable.
Consider each runner's skill, training, etc as a sampled variable. Then the top score in the sample depends heavily on the population size. Comparing the best draw from two equivalent groups of different sizes is thus going to favor the larger group. And this sounds like what they observed in the study.
That way we could really see females beat males for example in tennis.
Haven't there been enough "battle of the sexes" tennis matches already for us to know how this will go?
> Women have more body fat than men in both elite (Vernillo et al. 2013) and recreational (Hoffman et al. 2010a, b) athletes. In both elite and recreational runners the percentage of body fat is higher in women compared to men (Blaak 2001). It could be argued that fatty tissue may be used as an energy reserve and this could be an advantage for ultra-distances since runners tend to lose body fat during multi-hours running competitions (Karstoft et al. 2013; Schütz et al. 2013). Women might benefit from their higher percentage of body fat since both sexes lose a similar amount of fat during an ultra-endurance performance such as a 100 km ultra-marathon (Knechtle et al. 2010a, b, 2012a, b).
From personal experience there is a difference and it is a big difference.
You should absolutely train in a glycogen depleted state just so you will know what it feels like and can deal with it. But it's not how you would ever start a race.
They have seen evidence that these diets can retool the body to more readily use fat as an energy substrate. While this doesn't translate to performance gains, it can mean that on a multi-hour/multi-day effort that a self-supported athlete might need to have a bit less food in their packs as well as foods with a higher proportion of fat that are lighter. Lighter pack = faster athlete.
But...even low intensity exercise over long duration is going to result in the recruitment of FTa/FTb muscle fibers that run almost exclusively by glycolyis. So an athlete counting on fat to be the primary energy substrate has be really highly trained, practiced, and know their pacing thresholds really well to keep the recruitment of those muscle fibers to a minimum.
Best paper I know of on the subject is this one: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55b7ffebe4b0568a75e33...
Best book I know of on long-duration effort is this one: https://www.amazon.com/Training-New-Alpinism-Climber-Athlete...
I follow TFTNA (Training for the New Alpinism) and Uphill Athlete (Steve/Scott's new book) training regiments that Parent mentions.
They do talk about retooling your body to use fat reserves more than carbs. While I'm sure the evidence shows that keto diet might make this switch faster and easier, someone on a non-keto diet (carb based) can also do this.
My other very favorite resource is Shawn Bearden's Science of Ultra podcast, which is where I learned of the research paper I linked in my first post. Here's the one on fat adaptation: https://www.scienceofultra.com/podcasts/19 . He has lots of pretty hardcore exercise scientists and researchers on. It's one of my favorite things to listen to while grinding up a hill. :)
I'm not saying my personal experience should be considered universal, that'd be foolish. Just recounting that.
But it makes sense given how metabolizing fat and metabolizing sugar works. Insulin response, etc.
Have you tried? I always run before eating (not as part of a regimen, it's just convenient), as I expect many do. And my diet is closer to inverse-keto than keto.
I think that your comment falls into the noise category and is undesirable because of that. If you had explained personal experiences to show how you reached your conclusion, It think you would get a better reaction. If you also showed how other possibilities could be rules out, then I think people would find it very interesting and you would get many up votes.
Also, looking at comments, often I see only upvote and no downvote button. Why is that?
I successfully completed a marathon 3 months after reading his book after having never run more than 3 miles in my life. (Stu Mittleman - Slow Burn)
In the marathon distance or shorter, being fat adapted would be a bad thing, as you couldn't train at upper capacities. But where you are running purely aerobically for very long periods of time (12+ hours), this may be an advantage.
The secondary (or even primary) advantage would be a low carb or ketogenic diet is that it is anti-inflammatory. People who run ultra distances do huge volumes of training, and it may be enabled by a lack of inflammation.
https://www.thecut.com/2016/09/the-obscure-endurance-sport-w...
Anyway, here's the source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15615615
It states the maximum conversion is (290+/-25) kJ/kgd. It's been a while since I last worked on this subject but I believe that works out to somewhere in the range of 0.8% to 1% of body fat that can be converted into energy per day at most.
Of course there were some experimental controls in the study that don't always map exactly into the real world. There always are but this should be close enough for the discussion here.
note: this does not claim one can only burn 2lbs of fat/day only that resulting CO2 from burning some amount of fat must fit in the exhaling budget
This flies in the face of conventional wisdom because all of the original studies were only done on men.
Off the top of my head, I'm not sure if women do have a harder time losing weight than men, but I know that a woman's body reacts to starvation differently. That may play a role.
There is a massive need for "foundational" studies to be redone with women. The assumption that men and women have the same metabolism has been shown to be wrong, and it has a lot of broad and overarching implications, especially in the field of medicine.
Sounds like BS to me.
Running burns about 100 Calories / mile[0] (62.5 Calories / km).
100 km means 6250 Calories burned.
Fat is 9 Calories per gram, so 6250 Calories is 1.5 lbs (0.694 kg) of fat. Even if the calorie burn rate is way off - say by 50%, there is no way any of those athletes is in danger of running out of body fat.
And that doesn't even count the carb gels and other food runners typically eat on runs.
___
0. https://www.runnersworld.com/nutrition-weight-loss/a20784289...
Totally depends on the runner. An 85lb female athlete will burn X per km. A 300lb male, covering the same distance/speed, will burn at least 4X and probably 6X.
He was on Joe Rogan at least twice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tSTk1083VY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvWB7B8tXK8
Okay, at least that blog post is written by someone with a phd, but you can't really take this at face value either. It's probably reasonably true in general (obviously still highly dependent on the person doing the running), but you seem to be assuming that this rate is the same on short runs and long runs, which sound suspicious. I wouldn't at all be surprised if the rate of energy expenditure increased as the time/distance of the race increased. Also if they're running instead of sleeping, I imagine that is probably increasing energy use as well.
I'd also be pretty surprised it the 100 calories/mile was taking into account the person's resting metabolic rate. That could easily add another one to two thousand (more depending on the person) calories per day.
Finally, even with your analysis coming to 1.5lbs of fat, that's quite a lot of fat in a trained athlete. I'd expect most of the men running these races are well below 10% body fat, and the lower your body fat is the more resistant the body tends to be when it comes to losing more. Losing 1.5 or more lbs of fat would probably be moving their body fat percentages down quite noticeably, which is not easy to do at such low levels.
So maybe it is all bs, but I don't think it can be ignored so easily either.
You're way off
> This study compares body composition characteristics with performance among participants in a 161-km trail ultramarathon. ... Mean (+/-SD) BMI (kg x m(-2)) was 24.8+/-2.7 (range 19.1-32.2) for the men and 21.2+/-2.1 (range 18.1-26.7) for the women. Among the three fastest runners, BMI values ranged from 22.1 to 23.4 for men and 21.5 to 22.9 for women. [0]
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I understand that they are different things. Unless these are bizarrely jacked ultra-marathoners, BMI should work just fine.
>> Mean (+/-SD) percent body fat values for men and women were 17+/-5 (range 5-35) and 21+/-6 (range 10-29) , and ranged from 6 to 14 and 14 to 27 among the fastest three men and women.
I would imagine the fastest finishers are not "bizarrely jacked" (they usually look pretty scrawny), but their BMI is not very well correlated with their body fat percentage.
> We conclude that despite wide variations in BMI and percent body fat among ultramarathon participants, the faster men have lower percent body fat values than the slower men, and finishers have lower percent body fat values than non-finishers.
So I do stand corrected that not all of them are significantly below 10% body fat, but some definitely were (I don't see a breakdown anywhere giving an indication of how many), including some of the top finishers. I'd also imagine the ones at higher percentages who performed well probably have higher floors to begin with for how little body fat they can reasonably reach.
In any case, it is not at all abnormal for BMI to have nothing to do with body fat percentage or how jacked someone looks, especially with athletes. BMI is probably one of the most meaningless health metrics in common use.
I am surprised no one has mentioned Ann Trason that won 13 (iirc) Western States and used to win many ultras outright.
It's a small sport with not much competition.
Just look at the end scores of ultra-marathons.
If you look at marathon winners, it's clear that the male advantage of more muscle mass doesn't help here. You want to have as little energy-consuming muscle as you can get away with, and as little total weight to lug around as well.
But have they included relative different upper body muscle mass between males and females?
IF upper body muscle mass differential between genders exceeds the same differential for body fat, perhaps it may explain the declining performance gap between genders over distance?
Might male upper body physiology, excess to ultramarathon requirements, become a net negative compared to women’s excess body fat?
A human physics and engineering problem that possibly favours females at extreme distance?
I’ve got data for hundreds of people travelling 80km, but carrying 25kg.
Including female participants.
Different story with the additional weight carried though.
However, we did have 1 truly exceptional/outlier female who once came in 1st place.
Mental resiliency is very much an individual effort.
Having a lot of experience assessing humans in this realm, I don’t see any gender based causal factors.
However, the one human I met who was truly willing to push themselves to the point of true failure was a female. It was the only time I was nervous in my role. But that is strictly anecdotal.
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If you care so much go climbing, you'll see all women doing better than guys. Nobody cryes. Next topic please!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-Trail_du_Mont-Blanc
Spoiler. It is not even remotely close.
Headline:
"When Male Runners Lose to Women: Conventional wisdom has long asserted men outperform women in long-distance races. Ultramarathon results prove that assumption wrong"
Actual article: men outperform women in long-distance races, usually but not always winning:
"By the most common perceptions about the biology of strength and endurance, physiology was stacked against St Laurent. On average, her male competitors had bigger hearts, larger lung capacities, and leaner bodies. And most results reflect that: in last year’s marquee Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc TDS, a 145-kilometre mountain race with more than 9,000 metres of elevation gain, the first female to cross the finish line came twenty-third. St Laurent, who placed fifth among women, came sixty-first overall."
But sometimes women do win these ultramarathons. You'd never see that at any other distance.
The article throws in a bit of speculation about how men might be socialized to run too hard at the beginning of a race. I disagree. That observation says, to me, that the men competing in these events are not as well trained, not as experienced.
Look at the men's marathon and you'll see everyone taking it easy at the beginning of the race! They have to hire people to push the pace in the beginning because the elite runners don't want to do it. That directly contradicts the speculation about male socialization.
Long story short, women switch to catabolism way earlier than men, while they still have glycogen inside their muscles. Men don't switch to catabolism until after they are completely out of glycogen and are creating fucktons of lactic acid. Since your muscles run on glycogen, and lactic acid is not a great thing to have kicking around, women actually appear to have a better metabolism for endurance.
Unfortunately a lot of doctors and researchers are men, and are extremely dismissive of the idea that there is any reason to actually study women, instead inventing behavioral reasons for why you don't always get the same results for men and women in studies.
I think the fact that you are willing to chalk up the fact that women are winning these races on occasion to there not being enough elite runners has signs of a similar chauvanism.
(This is mostly off the top of my head, but I have a degree in biology and I have studied metabolism fairly extensively)
Or maybe it has to do with the fact that men drastically outperform women in almost any other physical trial, and this therefore has the markings of a statistical anomaly? What's with this desperation to explain away any differences with accusations of sexism?
What's next? Chauvanism is the reason we believe that men can lift heavier weights than women?
I replied to the comment above you in greater depth, but basically endurance appears to be something that women have the potential to be better at than men. If this strikes you as wrong, well, it's probably because it challenges your conception of male superiority rather than because of any innate advantage that men actually have.
It strikes me as wrong because it contradicts the actual data I have on hand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarathon#IAU_World_Best_P...
Stop injecting bigotry into everything. This axe to grind of yours is the very same that is infesting and ruining academia and industry.
My conception of physical male superiority stems from the inarguable fact that in almost every physical test men have been shown to unquestionably dominate. There's a reason sports are segregated. Your ideal world of equality does not exist; this bias is based in reality. Am I saying it's impossible in this case that women may actually be better suited for ultra endurance? No, but it's unlikely because the data isn't there, not because of your sexism Boogeyman man. I don't appreciate being slandered without substantiation either.
Edit: to summarize, extraordinary facts require extraordinary evidence, of which you currently have non, only plausible speculation. This has absolutely nothing to do with chauvinism, and, frankly, your reverse bias is dangerous.
I know you are joking to make a point but there are actually people that believe that.
You were making a good point until the ad hominem. The personal attack makes me want to discount everything you said.
Unlike other events, where strength is a limiting factor (for instance, sprint speed is limited by muscle mass), there isn't much of a reason to believe that women would be worse at distance running.
For instance, the same line of logic would be 100% chauvinistic if someone said "The best engineer in this field is a woman, but it's a narrow field, I assume the sample size is very small."
People used to make very similar claims about the inferior mental capacity of women as they do about physical performance now. Yes, men outperform women in feats of strength, however, in many sporting disciplines the fact that men continue to outperform women is most likely due to the fact that men are generally encouraged to participate in sport to a greater degree than women, and sporting communities are more welcoming to men.
The author of the comment I replied to has no basis for his claim that the sample size accounts for the women winning beyond a feeling that men are superior athletes in all ways. That is chauvinism, and if that claim makes you feel uncomfortable or angry, perhaps you should reflect on why that is.
Especially when you're backing them up with ridiculously biased assumptions (which aren't supported by the science): "In many sporting disciplines the fact that men continue to outperform women is most likely due to the fact that men are generally encouraged to participate in sport to a greater degree than women"
I'm sure the reason Serena Williams can barely compete with a fringe male pro is because society is mean to her.
You're trying extremely hard to avoid scientific realities and scolding anyone who acknowledges them as "chauvinist". Your method of argument is everything that's wrong with societal discourse in 2019.
Yes, order statistics are definitely relevant here. The bigger the sample, the more random fluctuations even out. If men have any edge in running, in a race between 1 man and 1 woman, the winner will nevertheless often be the woman; if there's a race with 1 million men and 1 million women, the winner would almost always be a male.
The article points out (somewhat obtusely) how this works within a race (a smaller fraction of women means an even more disproportionate probability the winner will be male), but seems like it should also works across kinds of races, too. The more niche a sport...
Off the top of my head, though, is that sufficient? There are many sports beside ultra-distance endurance races which are fairly niche, but the impression I get is that their elite events still don't tend to throw up female outright winners at all. I assume that ironman is fairly popular and taken quite seriously compared to most sports (as opposed to the few which get the lion's share of the attention and participation) and yet it threw up something as striking as Chrissie Wellington https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrissie_Wellington 's success.
Draymond Green height: 6'7 wingspan 7'1
Kawhi Leonard height: 6'7 wingspan 7'3
Also, the article is mainly about one woman. It mentions that the gap has narrowed but in order to have any meaningful analysis we'd need more stats.
Also, many, many people run marathons. So narrowing gap makes sense due to increased participation rate and better training; men and women aren't that different, on average. The extremes though are where differences truly manifest themselves.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone
Side effects include increased aggression, risk-taking behaviour, acne, heart disease, and prostrate cancer. Men are basically taking an increased steroid dose all their life.
Perhaps the price is just that men can't give birth.