What's wrong with a woman being faster?

what is the word for an irritating, attention craving, testosterone charged, feminist, tom boy, running geek?

Jzs wrote:

......Finally, and most importantly, average sex differences tell us nothing about individuals. Paula Radcliffe, the women\'s marathon world record holder, can outperform more than 99 percent of men. Even if there were a large gap between men and women in mathematical performance (and there is not), it would tell us nothing about the male or the female aspiring assistant professor who lands an interview at the Harvard Mathematics Department.

actually, in this case it does.

when talking about women\'strack and field world records, we\'re dealing with differences between the best women, and a high school boy.

so while a female may get the job at harvard, you would be hard pressed to find a women\'s world record holder who could beat the top h.s. boys in her event.

there\'s nothing sexist about it.

Hi Guys,

read this. Poor men, you should respect women ... :)

Tamás

What about the top athletes?

That's great, but aren't men still faster if we look at the very top-level athletes? Let's compare two of the 'hottest' Kenyan runners - Paul Tergat, current world cross country champion, and Tegla Loroupe, winner of the 1994 New York Marathon and an assortment of other major races. Paul is 1.82 metres tall and has run the half-marathon (21 . 1 K) in about 60 minutes. Tegla is just 1.5 metres in height and covers the half-marathon in 68 minutes. Paul's pace for the half-marathon is about 11,593 heights/3600 seconds = 3.22 heights per second. Tegla's tempo is 14,067 heights/4080 seconds = 3.45 heights per second. Tegla is actually faster than the world champion male!

What about world record performances? Certainly you would think that the very best male sprinter would be faster than the topmost female. Leroy Burrell, who stands 6 feet tall, currently holds the men's world record for 100 metres with a clocking of 9.85 seconds, which turns out to be a velocity of 5.55 heights per second. Florence Griffith-Joyner, who stands 5'6-1/2' tall, holds the women's world record for 100 metres with a time of 10.49 seconds, which is a speed of 5.64 heights per second. Using fair velocity comparisons (in heights per second, not metres per second), the fastest woman in the world is almost 2 per cent faster than the quickest man !

Such comparisons are even more striking when you consider that women are usually not as encouraged to go into sports as men are. As a result, Tegla Loroupe comes from a smaller 'pool' of distance runners in Kenya than Paul Tergat does (there are far more male runners in Kenya than female runners, because males get more assistance and overall support). Thus, Tegla may not in fact be the best-possible female runner from Kenya (better runners may have easily become discouraged and dropped out of the sport), while it's easy to argue that Tergat is currently the best long-distance harrier from the tiny country in the horn of Africa, since almost all Kenyan males give the sport a try. Likewise, Florence Griffith-Joyner comes from a smaller sample of athletes compared to Leroy Burrell, and is less likely to be the best-possible representative of fast running for her sex, in the world.

What the hell does heigth have to do with time? Bekele and Gebreselassie are 5'4" and 5'5".

so when we talk about the best swimmers in the world, we should list all the thousands of dolphins, fish, etc before coming down to michael phelps then.. same goes with listing all the men runners before listing women runners..

suzy FH isn't a good runner, then...

and the thing about listing the boys like that (in the two classes of races) is that they should and do compete against each other nationally.

we have separate world records for men and women, and for age brackets. therefore how 'good' you are is determined relative to a number of categories. the IAAF conversion charts are the most commonly accepted way of determining how 'good' a performance is. obviously if you want to do things differently than the iaaf, fine, but don't expect the rest of the world to run that way!

"the thousands of dolphins, fish, etc before coming down to michael phelps then.."

That's true, swimmers are crap. I can walk 100m faster than the 100m world record for freestyle.

You will, however, be hard pressed to find many animals that could beat Paul Tergat, or Khalid Khannouchi in a marathon.

I wasn't going to weigh in on this, but...

if you're going to rate people by time in a given event, whether it's 100m/5000m/marathon, then there's an incredibly wide spectrum of times for men, women, or both--say from 40 secs to 9.8 secs in the 100. All we can say is that more men are on the lower end of that scale than women. For that reason, we have separate events for men and women. Same thing for Divisions I, II, and III, or New Jersey high schoolers.

to the original question, any guy who has a problem with women beating him has issues. Fast women are hot.

There are literally 100s of fish in the ocean that can swim faster than Michael Phelps.

I can! I can!

Being a female I can honestly say that men are faster than woman generally, or better yet have the capability to be faster than most women when training and opportunity is the same. The fact of the matter is is that men are physically different from women, and men are USUALLY bigger, faster, etc. It doesn't mean that men are better than women, far from it, it's just a fact.