The Obscure Ultra-Endurance Sport Women Are Quietly Dominating

In 1985, Nature published a paper arguing that women would outrun men in marathons by 2000. Like so many other things that were supposed to happen “in the year 2000,” this prediction never came to fruition. Women’s finishing times were indeed improving rapidly as compared to the rate of men’s improvements, but that was likely because women were so much newer to distance running as compared to men. As science writer Rose Eveleth has explained, that Nature paper “extrapolated linearly from a few points of early data. (Its conclusions are mocked in many entry-level statistics courses.)” In 2016, the fastest men runners are still about 12 percent faster than the fastest women, and most exercise scientists doubt that women will ever outperform men at the elite marathon level.

Still, the idea made some scientific sense. Research has suggested that women runners may be better at pacing than their male counterparts, in that women are less likely to slow down during the grueling second half of a marathon. That may be because women’s bodies are better at fat-burning over longer distances than are men’s, or so one favored hypothesis goes. As the miles go by, women seem to be burning through more fat and fewer carbohydrates as compared to men; in contrast, men deplete their carbohydrate stores more rapidly, which may cause them to slow their pace or hit “the Wall.”

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