Ultramarathon Daily News | Monday, May 20

IRF/Justin Mock: All the weekend trail and ultramarathon results. Here’s what stood out to me:
-Chikara Omine at Silver State. When Chikara is on, he’s incredible.
-Alyson Kirk at Cruel Jewel. She’s had a pretty crazy few years…wow!
-Bryce 100…Nice to see Jill got a finish. This was a great post about her mindset leading up to the race.

Washington Trail Assn: Seven signs your trail is in trouble and what you can do about it.

Fast Women: Another excellent edition of Alison Wade’s newsletter. The Nike pregnancy issue is still making waves, and I think that’s good. Good for women’s sports and athletes, but especially good because it’s showing how the free market affects change and moves social policy. No need for government to step in…it took a well made video with a compelling message to get companies to change their policies and it took less than a week.

Hal Koerner ultramarathon — Hal Koerner at Lake Sonoma.

TrailRunner Mag: Read this. Are trail runners pushing the limits too far and risking too much?

Parents: Does anyone have a solution for arm sleeves for a skinny kid? Sunny likes to run with a shirt and sleeves, then roll them down when she gets hot, but we can’t find anything close to her size. Cut-off socks or my saggy sleeves are all she’s got…am I missing something? Thanks.

Dayum: Ever wondered what Kilian might run a 5k in? How about on some mixed surface with some hills? Looks like 15:20 this past weekend.

Dragon’s Back is going on right now and here’s the live tracking page. Check out all the info! Media teams, medical, and staff all have GPS indicators and the leaderboard is easy to navigate.

Canadian Runnning Mag: Yes, Mike Wardian is racing a horse.

Wyatt Hornsby: Wyatt and I are in a similar boat. Struggling with getting older and frustrated with how our bodies are performing. Oh, but the 45-50 AG is a breeze, right? Or 50+? Ha!

Nicky Spinks is redefining trail running in the UK.

Outside/Hutchinson: There may be a cure for overtraining, but it’s buried deep in this scientific article about ketones, hormones, and expensive recovery drinks.

When male runners lose to women in ultramarathons.

Beer: Why are NA beers more expensive? Here’s a good explanation from a UK perspective.

Adam Chase: Great recap on Transvulcania and Americans’ performances there.

13 Responses to "Ultramarathon Daily News | Monday, May 20"

Scott W. Kummer says:

May 20, 2019 at 5:57 am

Alyson Kirk’s memoir “On My Way Up” is phenomenal too. Really solid stuff.

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Ramon says:

May 20, 2019 at 8:29 am

Re the sleeves question Eric, I’m sure if you looked into it it would be quite easy to make an XS ladies size sleeve even smaller with a simple sewing machine …. turn inside out run down the sleeve hem on the inside to make it tighter around the arm. Cut the length if need be and again whizz round the end with the sewing machine. Simples. Or just buy in the material, make a load and Sunny has herself a little business 🙂

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tim says:

May 20, 2019 at 9:15 am

Reach out to one of the ETSY sleeve or gaiter makers? Being small they kind of operate in a custom way already, and at pretty decent prices. Plus – cool colors for kids…

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KS Petty says:

May 20, 2019 at 10:30 am

Cut the toes off a pair of tube socks.

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SDA says:

May 20, 2019 at 10:31 am

Maybe try a compression sleeve that wouldn’t have so much give?

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Andrew says:

May 20, 2019 at 10:39 am

It’s curious that the article from The Walrus frames the story as men losing rather than women winning.

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Nick says:

May 20, 2019 at 11:49 am

I’m always surprised at the lack of statistics and analysis with these men vs. women in utlras articles.

“…Sandra Hunter, a professor of exercise science at Wisconsin’s Marquette University, made an interesting—if not intuitive—find. The more men there are in a race relative to the amount of women, the bigger the performance gap between those genders.” So basically, if you sample fewer women, you’re less likely to find a fast, elite-level woman. This is basic population statistics, there is nothing interesting here!

A good sample of mens’ and womens’ relative performance in ultras are the 100 mile record and the Western States 100 record. These have an enormous number of performances and tend to attract “the best”.

100 mile record
Men – 11:28
Women – 12:42
Differential – 14%

Western States 100 records
Men – 14:30
Women – 16:47
Differential – 16%

The marathon differential is about 12%, so if we read these ultrarunning records without context, the top women tend to see a greater performance impact relative to the top men as distance increases. The numbers actually support a narrative counter to what we normally read about this topic.

However, if we assume there is no special sauce for either gender, I think that as more women run we can expect the performance gap to converge on the 10-12% number we see in the more popular running events, so that means we should expect a 16:15 sometime from the women’s side at Western in the next 5-10 years.

The fact that women sometimes win outright is probably just a manifestation of population statistics. If you have a sport with ~100-200 people per race, what is the chance you see a woman win outright, versus a sport, like marathoning, with 1,000-10,000+ people per race? You will occasionally see a trail race where an elite woman blows everyone away…possibly because there was no elite man running, because the number of runners is so low that you cannot adequately sample the entire performance spectrum. But as you get more competitors (marathons), or get to more competitive races (WS100), the chances of that happening plummet.

Population statistics are such a simple concept, but it seems impossible for journalists to understand. The actual statistics I can easily find do not back up the idea that women are outperforming men at longer distances, or similarly, that the performance differential decreases at longer distances. When you examine things like the 100 mile record and the competitive trail 100 miler records, for which there are a large number of samples for both genders, you see the same general behavior as you do in the 100m, the mile, and the marathon: about a 10% difference. That’s not interesting or inflammatory news, though, so it won’t get reported.

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Tyler says:

May 20, 2019 at 12:41 pm

The only advice to offer on this is to check out Pearl Izumi sun sleeves. I have the same issue with finding sleeves that fit and found a pair with Pearl that works well for me. Not sure if they make them in kid’s sizes…

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CJ says:

May 20, 2019 at 5:15 pm

A simple Amazon search for “child sleeve” brought up several. Not sure how skinny your kiddo is, but there are ones that look pretty darn small to my adult eyes.

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scott says:

May 20, 2019 at 9:56 pm

“Population statistics are such a simple concept, but it seems impossible for journalists to understand.”

It’s not that they don’t understand, they just either have something they already want to say or that writing an article that doesn’t have anything new to say isn’t really worth writing.

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David Christopher says:

May 21, 2019 at 12:30 am

In regards to the gender performance differences, Tracy Beth wrote a really good article on this on Irunfar (https://www.irunfar.com/2018/09/women-rule-female-physiology-in-endurance-running.html)
“Despite popular belief, women do not on average perform better than men at ultramarathon distances. Not even close, really. The fastest men ever were faster than the fastest women ever in 50-mile (17.5% faster), 100-mile (17.4%), 200-mile (9.7%), 1,000-mile (20.2%), and 3,100-mile (18.6%) events. For the 10-fastest finishers ever, men were faster than women in 50-mile (17.1% ± 1.9%), 100-mile (19.2% ± 1.5%), and 1,000-mile (16.7% ± 1.6%) events (Zingg, 2015). ” (~ numbers are a little outdated)

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Sandy Binder says:

May 23, 2019 at 6:47 am

Roadrunner Sports used to have arm warmers that were super tiny – i have ridiculously skinny arms where most xs are too big. RR’s fit me snuggly and are my go to pair (I have 2 pairs) Unfortunately they don’t seem to stock them anymore, at least not on the online store. ASICS xs are good too. The trick is finding the “wool” type ones, not the “plastic” material type.

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Alli says:

May 23, 2019 at 12:38 pm

Does Sunny have any too-small shirts you could cut the sleeves off? If not maybe check a thrift store if you have any good ones around. I’d recommend putting the wrist end of the sleeves at her bicep and letting the looser cut edge hang down to help them stay up. Good luck!

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