Tommy2Nuts wrote:
But your statements are just ludicrous. What are you basing any of this on? As you said, no factual basis.
Her logic is no more "ludicrous" than the rationale applied to reject her hypothesis. I enjoy when people who also have no factual basis come up with a rival theory that suffers from the same logical fallacy of the original argument, not noticing their hypocrisy on the way. Everyone seems to be exempt from the rules that they impose upon everyone else when it comes to this kind of argument.
It's probably some combination of psyiological differences, running culture, and sociological/biological tendencies for competition. While I find her argument to be cogent, being a student of the sport and a exemplary participant doesn't make one implicitly qualified to have definitive answers on these topics, which she understands based on her statements.
Does anyone disagree with the original point, that girl's 8Ks would be more boring? And why not go for broke and do the 10K? I hear they're letting women run the marathon in the olypics these days too...
Here are some numbers. They add nothing new, but sometimes actual numbers are useful.
guys
1st - 30:44
20th - 31:24
100th - 32:37
200th - 33:44
If you take the woman's winner and normalize her time to the men's winning time, you get the following spread for women when you apply the same scaling factor to the women's finishers:
1st - 30:44
20th - 32:19
100th - 33:43
200th - 35:06
Obviously it's not so simple (I can't imagine it being any BETTER than this though), but something like twice as many guys finish in the first 3 minutes after the winner than girls. That's more exciting.
You could make a strong argument that the woman's winner was a statistical outlier. Normalizing 2nd instead you get:
2nd - 30:52
20th - 31:44
100th - 33:07
200th - 34:29
So yes, it'd more than likely be less competitive.