An article was published by the BBC earlier this week sharing the amazing results achieved by Jasmin Paris at the Barkley Marathons, Rachel Entrekin at Cocodona 250 and Sophie Woods at the Via Alpina. We could also mention Courtney Dauwalter at the Moab 240 or Anna Troup at the Summer Spine as examples of where women have beaten a top-class field of male runners. The article asks the question are women “better suited to these kinds of challenges” than men? And shares data from the Runrepeat/IAU study “State of Ultrarrunning 2020” that “shows” that the longer the distance, the performance gap between men and women decreases and at distance of >195 miles, women marginally outperform men by 0.6%.
Some of the discussion around this article jumps to the conclusion that this data means women are faster or better than men at long ultras, and the article goes on to discuss several reasons why that might be the case, including physiological (muscle composition, fatigue resistance, fat metabolism) and psychological (tolerance for discomfort, sleep deprivation, resilience and preparedness). It’s a tempting and attention-grabbing conclusion, and while we love to see amazing women do amazing things in races, unfortunately the data doesn’t really support that conclusion.
What the Runrepeat data is actually comparing is the average pace of all the men and all the women who compete at a given distance race. So rather than answering the question “are women faster?” it’s really saying something more about the types of men and women who compete in these races. To really see who is absolutely faster, take a look at the world records achieved by the top men and women – those with the absolute best training and preparation, giving their absolute best under the best possible conditions. What we see is that irrespective of distance, men outperform women every time:
Here we clearly see from short track races through to multi-day ultra that the male world record is around 10% faster (or longer in the case of fixed-time events) than the female one. There are a few outliers, notably Meg Eckert’s stunning run at EMU 2026 which placed her 5th on the overall all-time list of 6 day results. The BYU womens record is notably further behind the mens. We took a deep-dive into women’s BYU performance in our last post, but the reasons why there is such a large gap here are unclear.
So why does the Runrepeat data show that women get faster compared to men at longer distances, and even beat them at >195 miles? We don’t dispute the data itself, but the reason must lie in the composition of the male and female fields at these distances. If we look at the average pace over all ultra distances, we see that it is actually getting slower with time, while at the same time course records are being broken, new world records are being set thanks to improvements in training, nutrition and hydration science, shoes and more.
What this graph means is not that human potential in ultras is decreasing, but rather it means that ultra running is becoming more widely accessible to “non-elite” runners, which is dragging down the average pace. The same trend is shown in distance from 5k to marathon – the elites are getting faster, but the average pace over all participants is getting slower. The most important influence over the average is not the maximum performance out of all men (or women), or indeed any grouping such as by age, but by the make-up of participants in that group.
So what can we conclude? It’s not that women are “faster” than men at long ultras, it’s that the women who choose to enter long ultras are on average better trained, prepared and have better race execution than the average man. In fact a study of marathon runners found “All though men are faster marathon runners than women (due to genetics) they are not the smartest. Women are 18.61% better at pacing.” As the BBC article says, it is not just pacing that gives women and advantage, there may be other psychological and physiological factors at play too.
There is a well-known phenomenon in recruitment where women do not apply as often as men to senior roles or ones where they are judged to be underqualified. A side-effect of that is that those women who do apply are actually more likely to be hired than the men! We believe something similar is going on in ultra running too. Ultras generally and the longest distance specifically are often marketed towards men (“toughest”, “most brutal”) which is a partial cause of lower female participation. But those women who do overcome this barrier might well be more highly motivated and better trained. Put bluntly, the longer the distance the more likely you are to find a field of made up of mostly well-prepared women and many men who are “winging it”.
So while it’s great to celebrate the outstanding achievements when women like Meg, Rachel, Jasmin and the others come out on top overall we shouldn’t forget that they are outliers, exceptional individual performances in a sport where on an average day the top man will beat the top women by about 10%. It’s easy to latch on to a few great female successes and use that to convince ourselves that everything is fine – don’t fall into that trap! Will the male/female performance gap ever close? Probably not – but if we want to see more women do well in ultras, the first step is to get more on the start line, make the playing field as level as possible, and give equal priority (and prize money if it exists) to the male and female winners – irrespective of the absolute results!