Interesting article:
As more women compete, however, women are starting to beat men in ultra-endurance sports, including in running races. In one weekend in December 2016, five women runners won outright victories at ultra-marathons across the United States.It’s not just ultra-marathons. In 2016, American cyclist Lael Wilcox became the first woman to win the suffer-fest that is Trans Am—a 4,300-mile race from Oregon to Virginia. Wilcox completed the course in eighteen days and ten minutes, trouncing the nearest male rival by two hours.
In ultra-distance swimming, women currently hold most of the world records, Roslyn Carbon writes in “Female Athletes.” Females outperform men in two of the three most challenging open-water ultra-distance events—the Catalina Channel Swim and the Manhattan Island Marathon Swim (males are faster in the English Channel). And the United States’ Diana Nyad is still the only person to have swum the 110 miles from Cuba to Florida, in 2013, without the aid of a shark cage.
Carbon writes, “the physiology of this supremacy is not well understood but may relate to improved fat metabolism, local muscle endurance at low workloads, tolerance of temperature extremes, and greater buoyancy in water.”
https://daily.jstor.org/the-woman-who-crashed-the-boston-marathon/
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