 Some of you will have seen this recently. Who runs faster, men or women? We think men. It is of course the ever-popular QI. And in series U episode 6, Sandy Toxford revealed to us that, as race distances increase, the gap in performance between men and women decreases, so much so that when we reach a distance of 195 miles or over, women are in fact faster than men. This follows on quite nicely from the rather uncomfortable discussion we had quite recently about transgender performances in parkrun. If you're not up to speed on that, I'll link it up there. Men are, it is generally agreed, physically faster and stronger than women. On account of genetics, which is no one's fault, not even the Romans. Yeah, I've got an idea. Suppose you agree that he can't actually have babies, not having a womb, which is nobody's fault, not even the Romans, but that he can have the right to have babies. However, in 2004, an interesting study was published in Nature magazine. It plotted a trend in the Olympic 100m final across the years. Male and female times have been falling consistently and in a linear progression since the very first women's 100m sprint final in 1928. However, the study noted that the female times were dropping at a faster rate than the male times. The authors decided to extrapolate the results into the future and concluded that if current trends continued, male and female times would converge and by the year 2156, a woman would beat every man in the 100m Olympic final with a time of 8.079 seconds. Author Andrew Tatum from Oxford University did admit, however, this was purely an academic exercise. Now, though, a new study by Run Repeat and the International Association of Ultrarunners, the IAU, and also referenced in that QI clip claims that women are faster than men. There's an amazing woman in 2018 called Courtney DeWelter. She won the race in Utah that covers more than 200 miles and it took her 58 hours, which sounds like a lot, but it was 10 hours less than anybody else. In a 5k race, men are generally 18% faster than women. Over a marathon distance, the gap narrows to just 11% and by the time we reach 100 miles, the gap is just 0.25%. So when we get to a distance of 195 miles, women are actually faster than men by 0.6%. Really interesting results and given the sample size, results that really should be taken seriously, the study looked at over 5 million results from over 15,000 ultra-running events. That is a lot of data. So surely that proves it. Women are faster than men over distances beyond 195 miles. That's it. No need to argue. Or is there? See, forgive my skepticism, but if that's the case, where are the women's podium finishing positions to back that up? I had a hunch that this 195-mile figure had been extrapolated from the data in the same way as the 100-meter sprint study. I mean, how many 195-mile races are there? None that I know of. And whilst 200-mile races are becoming increasingly popular, there aren't that many around. So I emailed the authors of the study at Run Repeat, and whilst I was very grateful to receive a swift reply, they simply stated that the 195-mile figure was from actual race results and not extrapolated, although they didn't go into any detail. So I took the results from eight of the top races of 200 miles and over to carry out my own analysis, to see whether my small sample size would correlate at all with the huge sample size from the Run Repeat controversial study. I looked at results from the Moab 240, the Bigfoot 200, Tahoe 200, in the UK here the 268-mile spine race, Tour de Gion 330km, the Swiss Peaks, the Cocodona 250, and finally the Centurion Winterdowns 200 here in the UK. In all, I examined 55 individual races and processed over 5,000 individual male and female race results. These are some of the biggest, most high-profile 200-mile races in the world. My guess is that whilst there are plenty of other 200-mile options, most of them will have far smaller and much less competitive fields. Just a brief note to say if you are enjoying the video or finding it useful or interesting, then please do click that like button, share it with your friends, and subscribe to the channel. Why not if you're not already subscribed? Thank you so much. Let's look first at the race winners. We had seven results for the Moab 240, six male winners and one female, who was of course Courtney de Walter in 2017. Across all 12 Tour de Gion results, we don't have a single female overall winner. And the same is true for the four results I looked at from the Swiss Peaks 365 race, no female outright winners. Bigfoot 200 is the same, eight winners, all male. However, things do change a little when we come to the Tahoe 200. Out of the nine results processed, there were two female outright winners, the latest being our friend Claire Banworth, who won outright in 2023. I processed 11 results for the Montaigne winter spine here in the UK. Jasmine Paris won in 2019, and she held the record, the overall record, for that race until this year. But she is the only female winner from all the editions of the spine. Staying in the UK, Centurion launched their first 200 mile event last year, so we have one result, which was a male win. Finally, Cocodona 250 in the States has had three editions, and all three have been won by men. So straight off the bat, we have 55 race results over 200 miles, and 51 of those have been won outright by men. This chart shows the average winning times for men and women in those races, and this chart shows the percentage gap between the genders. Note how the percentage is slightly smaller where we have some outright female winners, like at Tahoe and Moab. But things do take a slight turn when we start looking further back in the field. Here's a chart showing the average finish times across all eight races for both men and women. In five of the races, the men are quicker on average. However, look at the spine, look at Swiss Peaks and Cocodona. In these three races, the women's average finish time is faster than the men's. And then look at the percentages here showing the gender gap. Rather than the 20% we saw with the elite finishers, it's a much smaller gap in the middle of the pack. Male and female ultra runners are much more closely aligned. However, much more closely still doesn't mean faster. Overall, even looking at the average finish times, men are still quicker. So where does this leave us? Well, admittedly, my sample size is nothing compared to the millions of data points collated in the run-repeat study. But if that study really did look at actual races over 195 miles, they certainly won't have found too many, and they will have been looking at some very low-key events with barely more than 10 finishers. I wasn't able to find any races of exactly 195 miles, which makes me even more suspicious that at least some of the long-distance race data was extrapolated on a linear curve from shorter events. That said, it's most certainly true, and not an arguable point, that the gap between male and female performance times decreases the longer the distance. It's long been argued that women have a higher pain threshold than men. Furthermore, because they have more fat stores and less muscle mass and because estrogen enhances the body's ability to use fat as an energy source, women tend to metabolise fat better as a fuel source, meaning they can run for longer at a more consistent pace. It may be that in the middle and the back of the pack, women are able to keep going for longer, where men are more likely to suffer from gastric issues or succumb to pain or exhaustion. I couldn't find any evidence that women have better coping mechanisms when it comes to sleep deprivation. Indeed, you just have to look at the Barclay Marathons or almost any backyard ultra event around the world to find that men do tend to outlast women in those events. No woman has made it past Loop 4 of the Barclay Marathons. Jasmine Paris last year was only the second person to even start Loop 4. By contrast, 17 different men have completed all five loops of the Barclay Marathons. Outright wins for women at backyard ultra events are few and far between. Most famously, Maggie Guttrall won the 2019 Biggs backyard event, and Courtney DeWalter won the same event a year later. But in general, it's still men who are winning these events. In my opinion, it comes down to two things, participation numbers and self-belief. We know that women's participation in ultra running events is not where we want it to be, but there are some fantastic initiatives to encourage female take-up, such as the Threshold Series 5050 project. And perhaps, by encouraging more women to take part, we'll see more talent, and thereby find more women on the podium of these events. There are some incredible elite women like Courtney and Jasmine, and Claire Banworth look her up, who are covering enormous distances in superb times. But we need more of you out there on the start lines of these ultra-distance races, because you can beat men. There are women beating men at ultra-distance races, and you can do it too. We just need you out there. And I will see you on the start line next time. Take care.