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Comment by gwern | Hacker News Reader

Talk about bait and switch.

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."

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> most results reflect that

But sometimes women do win these ultramarathons. You'd never see that at any other distance.

There's a whole lot of "might" and "maybe" being thrown around here. Honestly, I think the biggest factor in these longer distances is the smaller sample size. There just aren't as many elite athletes competing at the ultra distances as there are at marathon and shorter distances.

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.

There's actually very substantial differences in the metabolism inside of muscles for men and women. Nobody realized this because literally every study that created baselines for what was going on inside the muscles in relation to the metabolites that ended up in the blood was done with men. So when women were later included in studies they just used the blood workup or VO2 to estimate energy expenditure and the like, and it turns out those are nearly completely wrong.

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)

> you are willing to chalk up the fact... has signs of a similar chauvanism.

You were making a good point until the ad hominem. The personal attack makes me want to discount everything you said.

That's an unreasonable thing to do, especially since it was less an ad hominem attack than it was pointing out the fallacy at the root of your misunderstanding. They were doing you a favor. But mostly because, "I will take this one line from your statement, to show that you were arguing in bad faith, and use it to nullify the rest of what you said," is... very obviously a rhetorical tactic, rather than a substantive counterargument.

Or perhaps it's simply a form of peer pressure. "Be civil or nobody here will listen to you".

I'm sorry you feel that way. Regardless of your feelings on the matter, the claim that women beat men occasionally because of a small sample size is chauvinistic, regardless of whether or not it was intended to be.

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.

No, what that person said was not chauvinistic. You're just trying very hard to imply it that way and your horrendous smugness about it isn't helping.

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.

>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.

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?

> What's next? Chauvanism is the reason we believe that men can lift heavier weights than women?

I know you are joking to make a point but there are actually people that believe that.

Men generally have the potential to be stronger than women, yes, but in general men are only stronger than women and larger than women, neither of which is particularly meaningful in endurance racing.

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.

> 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...

It challenges all the data that so far have supported that men dominate in endurance too.

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.

This is exactly the problem. Since running naturally normalizes for body weight, going by your "stronger and larger", we would expect men to be significantly slower. At any endurance event, starting at a mile. But the evidence isn't there.

> Honestly, I think the biggest factor in these longer distances is the smaller sample size. There just aren't as many elite athletes competing at the ultra distances as there are at marathon and shorter distances.

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.

"Honestly, I think the biggest factor in these longer distances is the smaller sample size. There just aren't as many elite athletes competing at the ultra distances as there are at marathon and shorter distances."

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...

If men evolved to be bigger and stronger, as measured in some peak power output, surely there's a price on that? The candle that burns twice as bright burns twice as fast as the saying goes.

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.

> surely there's a price on that?

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.

This article is about ultra marathons which have very low participation of both sexes. Likely we haven’t seen top performance for either sex. However in the marathon, the evidence is exactly opposite. The performance gap is large and widening. Paula Radcliffe has the fastest female time (male-paced) while men have continued to widen the gap to nearly 15 minutes. Even in the ultramarathon, the top times show a massive performance gap between male and female competitors. This effect truly is one of sample size. You see the same effect even in small local 5k races. Yes a fast woman can enter and win an event with a small number of competitors sometimes. These woman are faster than men in the ultramarathon articles are very poorly researched.

> If men evolved to be bigger and stronger, as measured in some peak power output, surely there's a price on that?

Perhaps the price is just that men can't give birth.

Men also die younger.

You also see this type of thing happen in long distance swimming. Dr. Julie Bradshaw holds many records for long distance butterfly swimming, including being the first to swim around the island of Manhattan only using butterfly (28 miles). I remember listening to a podcast about this, one of the theories is that women have a much higher tolerance for lactic acid build up, pretty much they can deal with sustained pain better than men.

Another contributing factor that has been theorized is that women are somewhat more buoyant than men due to a different distribution of bodyfat. As a result, they expend a bit less energy keeping themselves afloat and can instead use that energy for moving forward. It's probably no single factor but rather several working together to give women an advantage in long distance swimming.

At the very tippy ends of the spectrum of humanity that these crazy ultra-endurance athletes are on, some freak genetic mutations can account for significant differences. There have been a bevy of stories about Michael Phelps having the perfect body for swimming. Likewise I recall a nordic skier that dominated because he had a gene that boosted naturally his amount of red-blood cells, as if he were doping. I won't even touch what is going on with intersex runners in track and field...

It's interesting to ponder how many people there are who have these far end of the spectrum genetic traits that could give them an edge in some sport but have no idea and may have never even tried out the sport. How many other Michael Phelps are there in the world who never had access to a swimming pool, much less a social environment that would have encouraged taking up competitive swimming?

A common misconception about Michael Phelps is that he has an abnormally long wingspan, while it is about average for his height. Studies show that a wingspan is on average 2.1 inches longer than your height and Phelps is 6'4 and has a 6'7 wingspan. To compare some other althetes with actually abnormal wingspans

Draymond Green height: 6'7 wingspan 7'1

Kawhi Leonard height: 6'7 wingspan 7'3

Are you ignoring the entire rest of the article and focusing on just that one line? Go read the rest. It turns out there are race circumstances where women compete on equal footing with men, or may even have a slight edge.

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