Ultramarathon Daily News | Thursday, Feb 8

Ultramarathon and trail runners come from all different backgrounds and are all shapes and sizes. Some of us are fast, some are slow, but the one thing that binds us together is that nearly all of us have had to recover from a running related injury. Here’s a piece by David Roche that walks us through that process.

Ruby Muir, Kelly Wolf, DBo, Amanda Basham, Cody Reed….here’s your Tarawera 100k preview.

How to improve your downhill trail running. Great stuff.

–A list of the most innovative fitness products for 2018, including the above Superman simulator slash sex machine slash home gym slash proctology exam table slash VR gaming system. Innovative for sure!

A brief primer on all those nordic sports. I’m reminded of the first time OG host Scotty and I heard “skimo” mentioned and we thought it was a genre of music.

Check out our latest podcast with Angela Shartel. From massive weight loss to the pressures of being an elite runner to her incredible recovery following spinal surgery, Angela drops some knowledge on how she handles races, she opens up about dealing with self-doubt, and she gives us a tour of breweries in and around San Diego.

That episode was sponsored by the Yeti Trail Runners. Listen to our interview with Chief Yeti Jason Green right here. If you’re looking for cool trail gear or fun trail and ultramarathon races (from timed events to pure trail) in and around Atlanta, look no further than the Yeti Trail Runners.

Here’s a LetsRun interview with young female track stars Mary Cain and Katelyn Tuohy where Katelyn talks about managing expectations and stress. It sounds like it’d do her some good to talk to Angela about dealing with the pressures and keeping the joy in running.

South Africa is going through a severe drought right now, with taps set to run dry any day. How will Two Oceans Marathon provide aid to runners? And closer to home, we’ve had little rain this year and are looking at drought conditions for summer. How will California RD’s adapt to using significantly less water and ice at trail and ultramarathon events?

Definition of a bad wager: Betting against Speedgoat Karl in a hundred miler.

Doubling female’s lottery entries? In short, nope. Bad idea.

Andrew Wheating’s hilarious retirement video. He and Mocko need to team up for a video series. Can someone make that happen please?

Nolan’s 14 is hard enough. Andrew Hamilton just upped the ante with his recent Snolan’s adventure.

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10 Responses to "Ultramarathon Daily News | Thursday, Feb 8"

Chris says:

February 8, 2018 at 7:49 am

Look I’ll be the first to admit I can’t begin to understand the argument of making something equal by skewing the selection process in favor of one group. Its so counter intuitive. I also don’t have the answer to why female participation is lower in ultras, but does there always need to be a smoking gun? Can’t the answer, just once, be that females just aren’t as interested (by volume) in ultras than males?

Reply
1. Jeremy says:
  
  February 8, 2018 at 8:41 am
  
  I get that they want to encourage more women to run ultramarathons, and that there *may* be a stigma (although I don’t think lower participation rates alone is proof of that). But suggesting that the solution to that problem is arbitrarily rewarding women who are *already* interested in ultramarathons seems like a non-sequitur.
  
  Reply
2. Rachel says:
  
  February 8, 2018 at 8:49 am
  
  I don’t know the answer to your (good and fair) question, but I do think it’s possible that increasing opportunities for female participation would increase overall female participation in the sport. While it’s not a perfect analogy, I often think of the profound effect of Title IX on female athletics in the U.S. when this topic comes up. Title IX forced increases in chances to play for girls, and that dramatically increased female interest, and therefore female participation in sports pretty much across the board. With that example in mind, I don’t think you can assume low participation rates means women aren’t as interested in running ultras— there’s a good chance barriers to entry play a role and that interest might increase if those barriers were removed. I also don’t know that doubling lottery odds for women is the answer. But, I do think it’s worth considering the possibility that bumping up women’s lottery odds to some extent, in combination with other efforts like outreach (maybe women’s ultra running groups?) and breaking down some of the other perceived barriers to entry could lead to increased female participation in ultras.
  
  Reply
Sarah Lavender Smith says:

February 8, 2018 at 7:52 am

I can’t get over that photo of the woman in the VR getup on that Superman machine. Such a commentary on modern gizmos and where we may be headed in the future. Too funny and sad. Quick, unhook her and get her out in the wilderness for an old-fashioned trail run!

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More info please says:

February 8, 2018 at 7:58 am

Hey, “In short, nope. Bad idea” is a pretty blase response to a somewhat sensitive issue. I thought at first that you were summarizing the article, but instead that appears to be your personal opinion. I don’t necessarily agree with the article, but if you’re going to put out a firm statement on it, it would be great if you could also give your reasoning in order to get a conversation going. Thanks for rounding up all of these interesting articles!

Reply
ragweed1313Ron LaPoint says:

February 8, 2018 at 9:04 am

Lottery entry races make up…. maybe less than 5% of all Trail/Ultra races? 1%? Sure, there would be more women running Western States, but if low participation is due to cultural or gender specific barriers, I can’t see how this would cascade to the other bazillion races that DON’T have a lottery.

Reply
1. John says:
  
  February 8, 2018 at 12:45 pm
  
  Ragweed,
  You stated exactly what I was going to so I will leave it at, but I will also add that my wife runs and trains with me all year long and with a few exceptions does all my long runs with me and while I race 100k’s and am looking to get into Western States someday (5 time loser in the lottery) she has no desire to run any race over 50 miles and really prefers 50kers. So there’s that
  
  Reply
scott says:

February 8, 2018 at 11:24 am

Karl finding all the obscure 100s he can to keep upping his “most won 100s” stats. haha.
Race looks cool though, even with it being 3 loops. Great buckle, too.

Reply
pogo69 [Pat Janes] says:

February 8, 2018 at 6:55 pm

“In short, nope. Bad idea.”

In short, you either a) didn’t read the article; b) didn’t understand the arguments; or c) don’t want to lose your white male privilege.

For every one of the races mentioned, doubling each woman lottery entrant’s tickets would still only lead to a ~20-25% female participation rate. Exactly what is unfair about that?

As has been repeatedly demonstrated, affirmative action is often necessary to hasten the path to equality. Sure, we could wait for 40 years for the world to catch up – to allow women to realise equality in employment, parenting, home duties, emotional labour etc – but how is that fair?

I don’t to whom I should properly attribute the quote, but the responses here remind me of this:

“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”

Reply
1. random_person says:
  
  February 9, 2018 at 9:16 am
  
  In short, we didn’t read the same article. There are plenty of good-faith arguments about the state of female participation in the sport generally or in the races cited. The article did a lousy job of stating any of them. Maybe a woman could have done better.
  
  First, we’ve got overall participation ratios. I’d paraphrase “the argument” there as “…as race distance increases, female participation decreases. Without much more than one or two really loose anecdotes to try and explain that, obviously that’s because of the reasons I choose to believe.” To be fair, the author could be correct, but I wouldn’t come to that conclusion from anything else I found in the article.
  
  Then, the author dismisses out of hand perhaps one of their better possible lines of argument (the “Title IX” line from Rachel’s comment above, where participation might be low because of a lack of visibility) with their “Why is this? It’s certainly not for a shortage of role models [even though I can’t be bothered to spell their names correctly]” blurb. If that’s not a good argument, then I’m with Jeremy above–it’s going to take a lot of convincing that “giving an arbitrary advantage in entering a handful of ultrarunning races to women who are already involved in ultrarunning (because all the lottery races I know of also have qualifying standards–meaning that folks in the lottery, y’know, already must be ultrarunners)” is going to have any sort of meaningful impact on any underrepresented group taking up the sport.
  
  But, what really gets me are the ideas that the small percentage of races where entry isn’t first-come, first-served are a reliable proxy for the entire sport of ultrarunning and the seemingly entitled attitude that often goes along with criticism of race lotteries. “I, my favorite runner or my favored group in a proportion I deem reasonable couldn’t get into a lottery race” doesn’t say a thing about the vast majority of the sport. There are plenty of races (almost 1,500 in the US and Canada alone! The author of the article is European–I hear ultrarunning is even bigger over there!) to choose from, the vast majority of which impose no barriers to entry. Choose one of those. Figure out whether there’s a problem with female participation in the sport and what to do about it there. Let’s do meaningful work at the grass roots of the sport to create the world we’d like to play in, and the market will follow.
  
  But, you say, “Adrenaline Junkie For Show Magazine” doesn’t write puff pieces about most of those events? Okay, maybe you’ve hit on my true bias. There are plenty of folks who for some reason care very deeply about “the growth of the sport,” and who define its health by its growth rate. Some of those folks care or need growth because they’re trying to make a living in the sport (which is okay! Do what you love and follow your dreams and all that!) and need to concern themselves with a steady supply of customers. Others genuinely mean well, have discovered something they find wonderful and want to spread it to anyone they can reach. (That’s okay too!) As for me, I’m just happy having a handful of days a year I can go do an organized long run somewhere pretty. From where I’m sitting, growth for growth’s sake isn’t necessarily good. And, to the extent that someone on the outside of our community looking in just wants to come in long enough to run one of the big, high-profile races in order to brag that they’ve done something an outsider might have heard of or to check it off their bucket list, I don’t particularly care that it’s difficult for them to do.
  
  Reply

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