In Running, ‘La Difference’ May Be Genetic, Study Suggests
No matter how good women get in distance running, men are destined to be faster, a new study contends.
The study rebuts a controversial 1992 article that found that women’s world distance records were improving faster than men’s and extrapolated that women would overtake men. The 1992 article predicted that the women’s record for the marathon would equal the men’s in 1998.
That didn’t happen. The women’s record is 2 hours, 20 minutes, 47 seconds, held by Kenyan Tegla Loroupe. The men’s is 2 hours, 6 minutes, 5 seconds, by Brazilian Ronaldo da Costa.
And gaps like that will remain; the days in which women could make great gains against men are over, said researcher Phillip P. Sparling of Georgia Tech. “We found that the sex difference is really stable for the last nearly 10 years in events from the mile to the marathon,” Sparling said.
Sparling and his colleagues looked at times of the world’s 100 best men and 100 best women from 1980 to 1996 for the 1,500 meters (the metric mile), and 42 kilometers (the metric marathon of 26.2 miles). Their findings were published in the American College of Sports Medicine journal, Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise.
Men were about 11% faster in both events, and there was little variability. “That percent difference is a very constant difference,” and athletes can expect it to continue, Sparling said.
Sparling’s study did not seek reasons for the gender difference in distance running. He speculated that men’s greater muscularity and higher levels of oxygen-carrying red blood cells may be causes.
Sparling’s findings contradict the predictions of the 1992 letter in the journal Nature by researchers Brian J. Whipp and Susan A. Ward, both then of UCLA.
Whipp and Ward had looked over distance records dating back to 1920 for women, compared the record times to those for men, and discovered that the women’s records were falling more sharply than the men’s. They projected that, based on the difference in the improvements, women could someday overtake men.
What made women look so good in Whipp and Ward’s data was that women’s running was in its infancy, Sparling said. Record times plunged more quickly as women learned more about how to train and as greater numbers of potentially excellent female runners entered the sport, he said.
In recent years, however, women and men train about equally hard and well, Sparling said. And this makes it about equally hard for either sex to show big improvements.
Although Sparling may have a point, it could take up to 30 years to be sure, countered Ward, now at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. “The proof of the pudding is in the waiting,” she said. ‘If this is indeed a flattening off, it would need to be demonstrably maintained over a longer time frame.”
But Sparling’s study neatly sums up a perception that people who follow track have held for some time, said Amby Burfoot, editor of Runner’s World magazine.
“The running world in general was aware of the 11% difference, and people who traffic in this are forever comparing differences in times and genders,” he said. “I believe it’s very, very much sex-based, which is to say biologically based.”
Nor do the findings bother a top U.S. miler, Suzy Hamilton of Madison, Wis. “I think that women will never be able to catch men in the mile, just because of genetics,” the former Olympian said. “Just because a man can beat me in the mile doesn’t make me less determined to try to beat them.”
She doesn’t turn races into battles of the sexes, Hamilton said. “If I go past a man, I hope that guy is rooting for me.”
And it is possible that women may regularly beat men in one event--the grueling ultramarathon. Two South African studies found that women performed significantly better than men in races of 56 miles and more. One researcher quoted in the February Runner’s World believes women are more efficient at the greater distances. Another, however, says it’ll take larger studies and tighter research to be sure.
