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Running Endurance in Women Compared to Men: Retrospective Analysis of Matched Real-World Big Data

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Abstract

Background and Objective

To determine whether the gap in endurance performance between men and women is reduced as distances increase, i.e. if there is a sex difference in endurance, one can analyse the performance of elite runners, all participants, or one can pair women and men during short-distance events and examine the difference over longer distances. The first two methods have caveats, and the last method has never been performed with a large dataset. This was the goal of the present study.

Methods

A dataset including 38,860 trail running races from 1989 to 2021 in 221 countries was used. It provided information on 1,881,070 unique runners, allowing 7251 pairs of men and women with the same relative level of performance to be obtained, i.e. the same percentage of the winner time of the considered race on short races (25–45 km-effort) that were compared during longer races (45–260 km-effort). The effect of distance on sex differences in average speed was determined using a gamma mixed model.

Results

The gap between sexes decreased as distance increases, i.e. men's speed decreased by 4.02% (confidence interval 3.80–4.25) for every 10 km-effort increase, whereas it decreased by 3.25% (confidence interval 3.02–3.46) for women. The men-women ratio decreases from 1.237 (confidence interval 1.232–1.242) for a 25 km-effort to 1.031 (confidence interval 1.011–1.052) for a 260 km-effort. This interaction was modulated by the level of performance, i.e. the greater the performance level of the runner, the lower the difference in endurance between sexes.

Conclusions

This study shows for the first time that the gap between men and women shrinks when trail running distance increases, which demonstrates that endurance is greater in women. Although women narrow the performance gap with men as race distance increases, top male performers still outperform the top women.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the UTMB® Group, in particular Michel Poletti, Adrian Vincent and Didier Curdy as well as Callum Brownstein for English editing.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université Jean Monnet Saint-Etienne, Lyon 1, Université Savoie Mont-Blanc, Inter-university Laboratory of Human Movement Biology, F-42023, Saint-Etienne, France

    Franck Le Mat, Thibault Besson, Nicolas Bouscaren & Guillaume Y. Millet

  2. Université Jean Monnet Saint-Etienne, CNRS, Institut d’Optique Graduate School, Laboratoire Hubert Curien UMR 5516, F-42023, Saint-Etienne, France

    Mathias Géry

  3. INSERM, CIC 1410, 97410, Saint Pierre, La Réunion, France

    Cyril Ferdynus & Nicolas Bouscaren

  4. Institut Universitaire de France (IUF), Paris, France

    Guillaume Y. Millet

Authors
  1. Franck Le Mat
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  2. Mathias Géry
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  3. Thibault Besson
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  4. Cyril Ferdynus
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  6. Guillaume Y. Millet
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Guillaume Y. Millet.

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Funding

This study was supported by a fellowship grant from IdexLyon.

Conflicts of interest/competing interests

Franck Le Mat, Mathias Géry, Thibault Besson, Cyril Ferdynus, Nicolas Bouscaren and Guillaume Y, Millet have no conflicts of interest that are directly relevant to the content of this article.

Ethics approval

This study was approved by the Saint-Etienne University Hospital Ethics Committee (Institutional Review Board: IORG0007394, #IRBN1212021/CHUSTE).

Consent to participate

Not applicable.

Consent for publication

Not applicable.

Availability of data and material

The data used in this project are confidential but may be obtained with data use agreements with the UTMB® Group and the LIBM. Researchers interested in access to the data may contact Guillaume Y. Millet at guillaume.millet@univ-st-etienne.fr. It may take several months to negotiate data use agreements and gain access to the data. The author will assist with any reasonable replication attempts for 2 years following publication.

Code availability

All codes for data cleaning and analysis associated with the current submission are available at https://zenodo.org/record/6460646. Any updates will also be published on Zenodo, and the final DOI cited in the article.

Authors’ contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception; data collection and analysis were performed by FLM and MG; FLM and GYM drafted the manuscript; MG, TB, CF and NB provided additional comments and contributions; all authors approved the final version.

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Le Mat, F., Géry, M., Besson, T. et al. Running Endurance in Women Compared to Men: Retrospective Analysis of Matched Real-World Big Data. Sports Med 53, 917–926 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-023-01813-4

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