Do Guys and Girls Race Differently?

Yeah, guys don't collapse at the finish line after their 23 minute 5k.

I haven’t really noticed it before but i think you have a point. Men are usually more competitive (due to testosterone). Testosterone is why men have built the modern world, started two world wars, and advanced the human race in general. Competition and Motivation.

Most Girls (not all) are sweet soft creatures , so they generally just don't take it too hard on themselves i suppose

just a regular guy in the neighborhood wrote:

Yeah, guys don't collapse at the finish line after their 23 minute 5k.

Lol. Wearing long tights on a 75 degree day too I bet.

That might partially explain why men's races turn out to be tactical more often than women's.

My top three (hs) are runnning 18:xx for 5k xc. My next 7 are no slouches either. Beyond that they have different motivations but are all looking to do well their championship races.

They are aggressive and hungry to win. I have noticed is that most of them want to perform for the team and not let each other down. They would run into a brick wall if they knew it would help the team out. The guys would not.

There was a girl on my team that was always mad at me. She'd go out in a given pace and hold it for the entirety.

I can't go out that fast. I start off real slow and speed up gradually ending with a usual good kick.

Anyhow, I'd just beat her on countless distances and it really was never intentional. With or without her, It's just how I run.

A thread on Letsrun taking a shot at females? No way.

Guys vs girls? Why not boys vs girls?

Internetsherlock wrote:

Most Girls (not all) are sweet soft creatures , so they generally just don't take it too hard on themselves i suppose

You're joking right...?

In the'80s my girlfriend belonged to an all-women's running club, The Impala's. Some of the husbands/boyfriends would pace their workouts. From my experience the women seemed to endure pain and discomfort better than the men. Some would run so hard they would throw up. Some of you make fun of women collapsing at the end of races. Well, they're not collapsing because they're frail women, they're collapsing because they're pushing themselves harder than most men are able or willing to do.

old guy 74 wrote:

In the'80s my girlfriend belonged to an all-women's running club, The Impala's. Some of the husbands/boyfriends would pace their workouts. From my experience the women seemed to endure pain and discomfort better than the men. Some would run so hard they would throw up. Some of you make fun of women collapsing at the end of races. Well, they're not collapsing because they're frail women, they're collapsing because they're pushing themselves harder than most men are able or willing to do.

That's a feel-good myth that's been debunked. It's been scientifically shown that women have less ability to cope with a drop in blood pressure, hence the collapsing at the end of a race.

Nausea has nothing to do with being able to push yourself either. I used to puke at the end of races and workouts all the time, especially when out of shape. So did lots of my teammates. In fact, if I'm out of shape coming off a base phase, I don't even need to push myself that hard to reach that point.

That's a good observation, and I think it holds for almost all anecdotal evidence I can muster. It might be because of the types of girls/guys that are attracted to distance running, specifically competitive distance running or from inherent differences in modes of thought between the sexes.

My mental model of a 'hypercompetitive' male is an American Psycho/wolf of wall street figure, ruthlessly crushing others so that he can be the best. On the other hand, when I think of a competitive woman I think of a perfectionist - honing her profession until she is the best. It's easy to see how both sides of this could be manifested in competitive distance runners. Obviously there are exceptions to this I guess the next question would be why do competitive males and females differ drastically in behavior? I would try to provide an answer but I'm sure that it would sound like some sort of 'armchair evolutionary psychology', and my mental model is probably tainted by the media (as evidenced by my reference to popular films).

I believe that there is a passage in Gravity's Rainbow that compares the thinking of males and females to the analytic/synthetic distinction - Males tend to analyze, separating things into atoms, trying to find general principles from these atoms whereas women proceed from thesis to antithesis to synthesis via dialectic. One can readily proceed from the analyst to the neurotic, hypercompetitive male and from a neverending synthesis to a perfectionist. There's no dialectic in trying to be the best runner in the race, but there's something like it in trying to improve your performance from race to race. Similarly, there aren't many different atoms to identify across ones history of performances but there are a hell of a lot when comparing the self to others in a race. Again, as to why this difference of thinking exists I have no idea, it might not even be a question we can answer.

On another note - The 'free spirited' distance runner is another stereotype but thinking back to all of the clubs/teams I've ran with it is much more of a male phenomenon. Why would this be?

Huh?

This free-spirited distance runner observation has me spinning, seems to be almost an exclusively male phenomenon. I'm fairly confident that I have never met a runner-girl of this breed. This isn't to talk bad about girl runners, as a consequence there are way more poseur guys "trying" to be free-spirits than there are girls, which is about the same as having none at all.

I have no idea why this is not really found in females. I won't guess about the frequency of this in more general populations, but maybe that's where we'd find hints. Are there areas/fields where there are more "free-spirit" types in the women sub-population than the men? None immediately spring to mind but there are plenty where the distribution is probably equal.

But for my question it does kind of just come down to what "competitiveness" looks like for different genders. I think I agree that any attempt to formulate an answer is just omphaloskepsis probably half-informed by what we've been told HS, college, and life are "like". Girls are better at school than boys, where there is this "dialectic" process always at hand. And running "a pace" definitely seems closer to doing well on a test than trying to "be the best" does.

The guy who gave the testosterone answer could be correct. But maybe this answer is too atomic...a what more than a why.