Wow - fascinating stuff! There is something really cool about the fact that women seem to be more and more equal to men (and therefore beat us) as the distance gets longer.

Bike seems to be the exception though? Anyone have the reasonably simple explanation to this? (I get that it prob has something to do with muscle-mass or something and that cycling is a more strength-driven activity compared to running?)

http://www.cbc.ca/...ramarathon-1.3177415

A women Allison St, Laurent also won the Great Canadian Death Race in Alberta this weekend. 125KMs. 5000ft of elevation gain. rivers. EPic race. love to see this; women taking names! Great weekend for endurance sport.

Congrat's to all the competitors at the Ultra520K...I was out riding a long day on Sunday and saw many on the road. It was a hot day to be launching into that long of a ride. Good on 'em.

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@rhyspencer

Excellent, no need now for separate fields. Men and women pros should race together in all sports now. One race.

Bravo!

The simple explanation is that a women is generally smaller and will have less top line watts for a TT (regardless of distance) to overcome her on Coefficient of drag and the 700 wheel which offer the same aero drag penalty for her as it would for the 6 foot male. Pushing the bike through the air is a larger percent of her available power at every intensity. This is just how it works. There is a reason that all the pro men in Kona in the top 15 are between 5'10" and 6'1' and centered around 160 lbs.

the simple and true answer is that the men field was weak while it was a international caliber girl racing. Had she raced in previous years, should would had been around 3h behind the pace of the faster men.

The delta of difference in time between a ultraman is about the same. women lose about 1h each 8h at the ironman distance and it s about the same for ultraman(3h over a 21-24h race) for equal world class men and women.....

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Jonathan Caron / Professional Coach / ironman champions / age group world champions
Jonnyo Coaching
Instargram

The first half iron distance race I ever did, Californiaman back in 2006 was won by Michellie Jones. STer H20fun will remember that one.

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My business-eBodyboarding.com

That's what I suspected the real answer was when I first read this thread. I didn't say anything because I know next to nothing about ultra racing. I did at least make an effort and tried to find previous year's results for this race and they were a mess.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/08/the-golden-ratio-the-one-number-that-describes-how-mens-world-records-compare-with-womens/260758/


We should stop having gender-specific competitions though, seems pretty sexist to me.

Could you elaborate? Not sure what you mean by mess,

you can find last years results here:

http://ultramancanada.com/...014Final-Results.pdf

Maurice

2014 was fine but other years didn't work from what I could tell. I went back to 2011 if I recall correctly.

Congratulations to Kate and all participants! We need a race report and perhaps an "Ask me anything thread"!

I see what you mean, last year the results were fine. Looks like when they changed the website over from "ultra man" to non branded they didn't port over the results correctly.

As Jonny said a great athlete, but also likely a great crew helping her. Until last year no one had broken 8:20 on the run, then two went under that and it actually turned into an exciting race at the end, with only 7 minutes separating them. This year the winner swims 2:37 and runs 7:30 or so on day 3 great accomplishment.

Maurice

Luke warm agreement.

Back in 1972, a girl that sat beside me in class, would jab my hand with the pointy end of a compass when I'd look out the classroom window at the mountains, and long to be there instead of the classroom. I warned her that if she didn't stop, I'd punch her in the face at the end of the year. She kept doing it and I kept warning her. At the end of the year I was good with my work, punched her in the face and broke her nose. I would have done the same thing if it was a guy stabbing me in the hand. At just 11 years old, I realized I was all for equal rights for women. (the ERA was all the rage back then. I talked with my mother as I assumed women were already treated equally. She said that not everyone was born equal, but we all deserved to be treated equally (and fairly)). I believe I treated that girl back then fairly and equally as if a boy had done it. I have no regrets.

Now as an allegedly mature man, I don't condone violence and I haven't hit anyone in about 40 years, but I do think women need to be treated equally to men. Black, white, gay, straight, able bodied, not so able bodied or whatever, we all deserve to be treated equally. If not, then an increasing number of sub-sets of humanity get fought for. Hey, while I'm a Clydesdale, I don't think us fatties should get special treatment. I extend that same approach to all other sub-groups of the human race.

Now that it's been shown that woman can foot it with men I can sympathize to some extent with people who think there should be just one group in races. Hell, I get beaten by all sorts of women in races. I feel no shame in getting beaten by a woman. I do feel shame that I'm a useless fat FK that gets beaten by so many PEOPLE regardless of which sub-set of humanity they come from.

(hopefully people read this in the way it was intended and don't take it as flame bait. It's just a discussion afterall, not war)

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TriDork

"Happiness is a myth. All you can hope for is to get laid once in a while, drunk once in a while and to eat chocolate every day"

Can it, fattie. ;-)

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float , hammer , and jog

Now that it's been shown that woman can foot it with men I can sympathize to some extent with people who think there should be just one group in races.//

Where has that been shown? What i see is that no matter what the distance, or the event, elite women will always be behind the elite men. Don't confuse the fact that a woman beats you, or your friends, or me even, that they have somehow caught up with men in sport. As Jonnyo pointed out, there was no good men at that race of her standing in sports. Seems like no matter what the distance, you will have about a 10% gap in top performances, +/- a % or two.


I don't think you are going to get any agreement from women to merge the genders in sport either. I'm just amazed at how many of you actually believe there is some parity in performance, it is not even close...

Where is it shown? In the race report of the original poster that's where. Sure, it's a one off, unless you see that it's happened a few other times. Sure they might be against weak men's field in that or those cases, but it still happened. So that's where it's shown

As I noted earlier, my mother pointed out to me that we are not all created equally, but we all deserve to be treated equally. To me (but not most others apparently) that means in the case of triathlon etc, we should all just race open division and let the chips fall where they may. To me also, the other option is for everyone to have a separate division so we can all feel like winners. At the moment we currently have gender and AG divisions. And of course there is the sometimes Clydesdale division also.

I have raced in races with gender and AG splits and once even raced Clydesdale. That said, I only ever look at how I finished overall. I do appreciate that others prefer to see how they did in their division. I see one open division as fair. Others see multiple divisions. Some people justify EPO or T supplementation. If we kept it simple, there would be less crying about what should constitute a division.

I do however agree that generally women are 10% behind men overall, most/all other things being equal. People with other conditions (can't think of a better term just now) can also call for a division. We have a local dwarf that rides his bike (surprisingly quickly too). Females are born females (forget the Caitlyn thing for now) and they get a division. Dwarfs are born dwarfs and they too are arguably limited in how fast they can do a tri, just like a women is essentially limited to going 90% as fast as men. Playing devils advocate, I think we should have dwarf divisions, with AG's of course, and a lighter limit for dwarf Clydesdale division, female, 40-44.

Hopefully my point hasn't been lost, but I suspect it has. Oh well, back to work, my boss is coming :-)

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TriDork

"Happiness is a myth. All you can hope for is to get laid once in a while, drunk once in a while and to eat chocolate every day"

Surely Slowman needs to add a "Like" button to the forum.


instead "+1" will have to do for now :-)

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TriDork

"Happiness is a myth. All you can hope for is to get laid once in a while, drunk once in a while and to eat chocolate every day"

let us not forget a woman who did win a race with legitimate mens fields:

Pam Reed - 2002 AND 2003 badwater ultramarathon 135 overall winner (male and female)

Badwater is a novelty event held in extreme conditions. The race director is also known to have used the invite-only entry process to put his thumb on the scale.

Try Western States or Hardrock.