© 2005 BMJ Publishing Group Ltd & British Association of Sport and Exercise Medicine
LEADER
Female runners
Women will do it in the long run
1 Centre for Sports and Exercise Sciences, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Essex, Colchester, UK
2 University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr Beneke
Centre of Sports and Exercise Sciences, University of Essex, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK; rbeneke@essex.ac.uk
In long distance races female runners can beat male runners
Keywords: sex differences; ultra-distance running; female athletes
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Will female athletes ever outpace male athletes in running events? Time and again this question has caused the most ambitious debates with considerable recognition in the "lay"1 and sports science society.2–5 Although serious consideration does not indicate the slightest chance of a woman being the fastest human on the planet at distances of 100–200 m, there are factors that may favour women over longer distances.
It is not only the rapid improvement in female running, especially over the marathon distance, between 1963 and 1984 that supports the idea that women may have a chance of outpacing men. Further support comes from findings such as differences in the ability to run aerobically at a higher percentage of maximal oxygen uptake,6 the use of ingested and stored glycogen,6 lipid metabolism,7 and possibly the acute response of growth hormones,8 in the balance between gene transcription, translation, protein breakdown,9 resistance to oxidative
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