Older women are kicking younger women's butts (at least in road races, says the NY Times)
Over the summer, I wrote a post about my experience in the Manhattan Half-Marathon. I explained how I’d gone into the race with the impression that women weren’t running as hard as they used to (or at least, as hard as I used to). Although I’d heard a lot about the record numbers of women participating in races, it didn’t seem like women runners were breaking many speed records. However, I finished the race--and my post--on a note of optimism. I had my butt kicked by plenty of serious, speedy chicks, and that made me feel psyched to bury them –- I mean, to compete against them, in future races.
Not long afterwards, an article about female runners appeared in the New York Times. But instead of follow the media trend and focusing on how many women are running, health writer Gina Kolata focused on how women are running. About two years ago, Kolata, a longtime jogger, realized that she’d been running without a purpose (just running to run), and decided to train for a 5k race. The experience apparently jump-started Kolata’s mojo and unleashed her inner Flo-Jo, encouraging her to become a more committed runner. At the races she now regularly attends, Kolata has been surprised to discover that unlike men, women seem to get faster as the age. “At a recent five-kilometer race in Pine Beach, N.J., which drew nearly 1,000 runners,” she noted, “the fastest man was 24 years old and the men’s times increased with each five-year age group. But the women were different — their times were all over the place with older women beating younger women in almost every age category.” Kolata looked at the results for a bunch of other US races, and found that older female runners were outpacing the younger ones. She says that results like this got her to thinking, “Are women really trying in these races and, if they are, why are older women beating younger women?”
Kolata posed this question to several professional sidewalk-pounders, and came up with some theories. Maybe women are shortchanging themselves, suggested Mary Wittenberg, the president of the NY Road Runners, and “are too inhibited to put their full passion out there.” Maybe women are clueless about how to train, said an orthopedic surgeon (she offered to show them the way in her clinics). Both of these women also brought up the insightful idea that perhaps women are reacting to the message that most advertisers present to them, which is that they should “Run Easy” (as Reebok says) and congratulate themselves for simply getting out there.
A male coach who works with elite runners thought that older women may be faster because they’ve recently had an epiphany about their own physical limits. “Most middle-aged women grew up when track and cross-country teams were for men only,” Kolata writes. “Some of those women, who had no opportunity to race when they were young, are just learning to be athletes and are running faster than younger women who may not care as much.” (In addition, these older women probably haven’t had as much exposure to those “tortoise-beats-hare” marketing messages.)
This sounds very empowering -- how exciting that older women are coming out ahead! Running faster may be the one thing we have to look forward to age we age.
However, as I noted in my post, the number of younger female runners (and according to Kolata's theory, slow runners) is surging, and the average age of female runners seems to be tending downward (that was certainly the case at the Falmouth Road Race we ran in August -- I should look up the official stats at home). It's nice to think that these women may speed up with age, but that's still a couple of decades away. And who knows if they'll still be running in their twilight years? I still harbor some worries that the bloated fields of recreational runners ("rec runners") devalue the sport, and women's status within it. Maybe Nike and Reebok and the rest of the sneaker companies should consider encouraging runners to "Run Hard." In the meantime, we women runners can keep repeating that message to each other.
Update:
I just finished reading Carol Lloyd's Broadsheet post about Kolata's article, as well as the accompanying letters from Salon readers. Lloyd (and a lot of letter-writers) were frustrated that Kolata didn't address any of the physiological factors that might explain why older women are faster than younger women, and instead focused on subjective quotes and hypotheses. Lloyd points out that it's well-known that women tend to be more successful than men at super-long races like ultra-marathons than at short sprints like 5ks. She also does her own research, and presents a study that says that "at runs of 66 miles and more, women may actually enjoy a physiological edge because of their superior endurance." Lloyd concludes, "Since older men and women do better than younger runners in ultras, I can't help wondering if there's not some physical change that allows some older women's bodies to pick up their speed and at least leave their younger selves behind." An interesting point, and one that Kolata should have explored further. I'd like to see more about these physical changes as well (some letter-writers suggested that perhaps childbirth can improve women's endurance). However, I still think there's something to Kolata's point that women aren't encouraged or train seriously or commit to the sport, and I don't think it's insulting or unfair to suggest that the reason a lot of younger women aren't running as fast as older women is because they aren't trying as hard.