Comment by bluealienpie
5 hours ago
You are quoting it out of context. The article made reference to endurance events prior to this as well. Also, it’s extremely relevant to idea that Neanderthal have similar wear patterns on the bones. This article is in reference to hunter gatherer theory. Our modern concepts of male/female physical characteristics may make our judgments of prior humans inaccurate.
“ Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves.”
As other people are pointing out, we are going to great rhetorical lengths to avoid the empirical fact that in almost every major event based on physical strength or endurance, men outperform women. Are suggesting that every data point from every cultural, ethnic, national background in the world is contaminated by sexist bias?
> Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.
But that's obvious nonsense. It doesn't even pass a sniff test, if you know even the first thing about running. We're talking about many, many data points, all pointing in the same direction: in practice, men outperform women in distance sports [1].
To even begin to argue against this mountain of evidence, you have to resort to slippery rhetorical tactics, like this:
> As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves.”
So, the argument being implied here (but not actually made!) is that the performance difference we see throughout the history of the marathon is due to...pace setters?
Y'all realize that the competitors can run faster than the pace setters, right?
This reminds me of the old expression: "Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out."
[1] I'm talking about distributions here. Obviously, there are going to be many women who outperform many men on an individual basis.
> men outperform women in distance sports
Boy, you sure picked the wrong category. It's women who are better at endurance events.† Men have an advantage in power events.
† Here's just 2 recent ones off the top of my head:
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/05/us/american-solo-rowing-hawai...
https://www.womenshealthmag.com/fitness/a74192266/catherine-...
That's interesting! At the same time, your two linked articles:
> Pfendler ... after nearly a month and a half at sea ... appears to have broken both the previous women’s speed record as well as the men’s speed record
Would you say hunters keep running for 1 month to catch an antelope?
And:
> Catherine Breed, 33, didn’t look terribly exhausted ... swimming for more than 100 days ... the entire 900-mile length of the California coast
It makes sense if in ultra-ultra marathons, rowing, swimming, there's advantages to having more body fat and other female traits.
But hunting is shorter and quicker:
"Hunter-gatherers (such as the San people of the Kalahari Desert) typically pursue an antelope or kudu for 4 to 8 hours, covering a distance of roughly 10 to 30 kilometers (about 6 to 19 miles) before the animal collapses from heat exhaustion", an AI said.
(And, as the sibling comment about marathons says, then men are faster.)
It helps a lot when you don't cherry-pick data that supports your pre-existing belief.
https://runninglevel.com/running-times/marathon-times
https://swimswam.com/comparing-mens-womens-records-in-swimmi...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/2052-1847-6-7
https://results.nyrr.org/event/M2025/overview (pick any year you like by changing the URL)
https://www.marathon.tokyo/en/about/past/2026/ (Same)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-46032-9?fromPaywa...
The overall story is one where the difference in performance decreases with distance, but is very real.
Is a marathon a power event?
“Y'all realize that the competitors can run faster than the pace setters, right?“
Generally they can’t - the pace setters run at a pace above typical max for the distance (but within max for the shorter distance they are running), sheltering the people they’re pacemaking for.
You want to believe things are simple, but they’re not.
> Generally they can’t - the pace setters run at a pace above typical max for the distance (but within max for the shorter distance they are running), sheltering the people they’re pacemaking for.
Come on. Think things through to the end. If it were actually true that the pace-setters could run faster than the competitors for the full marathon, then the pace-setters would win the event.
What you want to say is that the pace-setters are capable of running a faster pace than the competitors for a shorter distance. Maybe that's true (I doubt it), but it's not responsive. Pace setters are there to set a pace, like a metronome. If the competitors feel this pace is inadequate, there's absolutely nothing stopping them from running faster, or demanding a faster pace-setter.
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> We're talking about many, many data points
Many of those data points are contaminated by a long tradition of sex- or gender-segregated races.
Here are a couple of interesting studies, which I assume are the ones the SciAm article is referring to, but I haven't checked.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38684111/ :
> "There is a prominent sex-based difference in athletic performance such that males outperform females by 7%-14% in races from 100 m to marathon. In ultramarathons, the difference is often much smaller, leading to speculation that females are "built" for the sport. However, data are confounded by the low number of female participants; just 10%-30% in any given race. This study compared data from two ultramarathons where males and females competed in comparable numbers. [...] In conclusion, the sex-based performance discrepancy shrinks to 1%-3% in ultramarathons when males and females compete in comparable numbers."
A key point in the above quote is "data are confounded by the low number of female participants; just 10%-30% in any given race." This calls the "many, many data points" that you mentioned into question.
Another study, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12068597/, of 56 suitable races, found that "pacing was not consistently affected by sex or age."
Re keeping an open mind, the corollary is that if you're not willing to ever question your assumptions - a.k.a. biases - you're not going to be able to update your understanding based on the facts.
There are literally thousands of female participants in marathons around the world every year, and you have to be in denial to ignore the obvious sex-based difference in performance.
For ultramarathons, in particular, the performance difference is smaller, but it still exists. The most you can claim is that at ~200 miles there's a slight average performance advantage in pace for women in specific studies.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-46032-9?fromPaywa...
https://trainright.com/women-faster-than-men-ultramarathon/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3870311/
> It doesn't even pass a sniff test, if you know even the first thing about running.
And yet, it seems you do not know that the gap between men and women shrinks the longer the distances get? Also, as you are saying yourself: this is about distributions, not necessarily about the top 0.1% of the world. The article makes the claim that on average, women would perform better in ultra-endurance events, supporting their thesis that women actually did the hunting back then. You might disagree with this, but the article is more nuanced, and reducing it to the rage-bait comment above does not do it justice at all.
> And yet, it seems you do not know that the gap between men and women shrinks the longer the distances get?
So what? The gap exists. Saying that it diminishes with distance is interesting, certainly, but it's a far cry from evidence that the gender gap is due to something other than biology.
> The article makes the claim that on average, women would perform better in ultra-endurance events, supporting their thesis that women actually did the hunting back then.
This is sophistry. In reality, even on average, men are faster than women.