Make A Comeback wrote:
Read her post again. It wasn't height or short legs that held her back - it was being female.
But its SUCH a good example of a man explaining stuff that obviously I, with my primitive female brain, couldn't work out for myself!
I did not state that I have short legs for my height. In reality, at 5 feet 2, you have to have pretty long legs for your height, particularly the calves, in order to be anywhere near a reasonable runner when combined with other female anatomy.
Without wishing to bore people, the lack of height means other stuff for women in running - I lost track of the number of coaches who told me I was "too short" to be a runner. Not that short for a female, but it was commented on a lot by coaches. [/quote]
And at 5'7 if you want to be an elite runner, you better have long legs also. Why don't you bore us and explain why you think being tall is an advantage for a distance runner? After all male distance races have been dominated by tall guys for years right? The short guys like Kenny, Haile, Kipchoge must have really sucked. Men are different right? So 5'2 Joan Benoit had no chance against 5'8 Gete Waitz in 1984. Vivian Cheruiyot at 5'2 also isn't running fast. Mizuki Noguchi at 4'11 ran 2:19 back in 2005. And so on.
Height has very little to do with running performance except for extreme outliers (i.e. the 6'2+ crowd or 4"10 people) . If you look at elite runners, they pretty much match the population they come from with a slight bias to being shorter. In the US that means you get a lot of 5'2-5'7 woman as that is about 90% of the population.
Feel free to post any paper that suggests otherwise. I expect to be waiting a while