Where do figures about a shortage of women in ultrarunning come from and, if they're accurate, what do they imply?
Also, if gender itself is arbitrary, fretting over M/F disparities is incoherent
Someone recently sent me a graphics file, which I opened in an image editor and modestly rearranged and decorated until achieving the result below.
The person responsible for the unedited original is a running coach with 118,000 Instagram followers. Before getting to the point, I’ll offer another of my periodic attempts at articulating my mindset when chasing down content like this.
I often remind myself to philosophically separate what I’ll call messy-output people into groups. There are those who are creatively striving in earnest, or perhaps not quite psychologically capable of even doing so, and then there are those who are knowingly perpetrating malign hoaxes and associated evils—for material gain, out of deep-rooted spite, or both.
Similarly, I strive to distinguish between actors who lend support to messy output, whatever its source. Some have been duped or harnessed by grim social and vocational incentives into conforming to corrupt belief systems, while others are conscious grifters and intentional disruptors who are, again, in it for the money, the cruelties and absurdities, or all two.
Some people are obsessed with running and want to make a living off it somehow or merely attract a mob of runners with mostly joyful online shouting. Many of these people are not gifted writers or devoted researchers. I’ve been following running—sometimes against my will or better judgment—for almost four decades, and I try to avoid making material claims I know are not true (usually very easy) or that I cannot support with evidence (a grayer area, but it’s usually obvious when I’ve lapsed into partial or untrammeled speculation). Yet I still barf on my keyboard from time to time.
Being a gregarious bozo is not a moral offense, except in the cases of bozos who partition themselves from any detractors they’re unable to gaslight or otherwise intimidate into oblivion. These bozos are, of course, the grifters and disruptors whose motivations are disgusting and who deserve endless shaming until they and their ratlike and disfigured personas wither and die.
Many people within and tangential to the running industry have knowingly supported blatantly false ideas in recent years and, in so doing, stepped onto the eventual wrong side of history. They have taken this dubious step because they have gambled that being one lying voice among many will result in more gains than losses. Since most of the gains are immediate and short-term and most of the consequences delayed, and because most of the people who are now on the wrong side of timeless and re-emerging history are not very bright to begin with, this seemed like a smart calculus at the time.
Declaring someone you know is male or female to be otherwise makes you an utter idiot as well as a brazen liar, until 2020 never a charming combination in the darkest crannies of any stable subculture. So does pretending that black people encouraging hatred toward white people is not only not as racist as can be but downright progressive. So does pretending that a 5’ 3”, 300-pound slop-heap of deceit and purposeful gluttony—someone who posts pictures of her leviathan carcass on the can, and who at any time surely has a week’s worth of slow-moving feces in the two-foot fatties-only trench between her anus and the actual junction of her ass-fissure with the aghast outside world—is both a social hero and a fitness icon.
Affirming a belief in any of these things makes the affirming party a knee-walking dunce. It makes “them” an evolutionarily stalled troglodyte-hominid chimera whose mind and morals are unfit for purpose; someone who goes through drool-bibs, social-media blocks, and dodgy excuses for rhetorical stumbles faster than this reprobate bullshitter, the queen of all covid-centric loons, goes through N-95 masks. (In two years or less, Aysha Mirza will have deleted her Twitter account, maybe framing this as an accident or the result of password probs, and will be pretending she never posed as a biologist.)
There is, in my mind, no insult too crass for someone who goes out of their way to lie about basic facts, regardless of how trendy it is. And yet:
David Roche “silently” deleted that tweet, and around eight or nine supporting ones below it, a year after posting it. He did this because I wrote something deriding it. His only acknowledgment of my article was referring to an unknown hater and playing the wounded, alarmingly gelatinous and cartoonish bitch. Some of his equally courageous followers duly hectored me for my article under anonymous names or harassed anyone who shared it.
In the past, this display—the lie, the slimy attempt to delete of evidence, the posse of mentally challenged followers, all of them partly shielded from their intellectual and ethical deficits by privileged upbringings along with the energetic application of anything resembling a “mute” function, online or off—would have constituted grounds for universal derision among runners. Today, it’s building a brand.
Concerning each of the above solecisms and others—anti-white racism, anti-woman feminism, anti-health “fitness,” anti-course and anti-time “achievements," anti-everyone metafaggotry and acidic rainbows —the facts are going to eventually win out. Society is wrecked up forever—make no mistake about that. But plenty of people will still be alive and running when it’s time for the people on the wrong side of history to start making their way back toward the right side.
Some—the earnest creators and the hapless dupe-drones—will offer apologies, should they remember having written or said any pertinent idiotic things. Others will remain in high in-group standing but pretend nothing ever happened. And the purely malevolent people—the bloated layabouts and yammering race-baiters and yeasty old maids—will be absent from running, because they aren’t runners and will therefore have no home in the sport once the forces keeping them visible as jesters and crude-demolition specialists are withdrawn.
Anyway, according to the Instagram post by “runtothefinish,” there are four and a half times as many ultramarathon runners as there were ten years ago, but only 16 percent are female. I’ll assume both claims are accurate because nothing changed if they’re completely made up.
What if only 10 percent of ultrarunners in 2013 were female? Wouldn’t this be cause for celebration? But of course, it could instead be the case that most ultramarathoners—even as many as 72 percent—were female in 2013.1
Another possibility is that women just aren’t as interested in running very long distances just to prove they can. At a certain point, the kind of risks associated with ultramarathon become more associated with traditional “machismo.” Men are simply more naturally inclined than women are to plunge their bodies into rugged-to-hazardous situations for no good reason except to later brag about surviving their own risk-taking. This is both alpha and stupid (there are reproductive trade-offs buried in these behaviors, even for old people who rarely shower sporting Gandalf beards in multiple places). It is an overwhelmingly male trait.
Participation in road races also shows a gender disparity, but it goes in the opposite direction. And the gap women enjoy over men here is increasing, with women only overtaking men around seven years ago.
If structural oppression is keeping women from entering running events in large numbers, that factor is evidently unique to the very long, off-road distances. What would account for this? It could be anti-woman men, anti-woman women, or both.
If there were a way to quantify misogyny, I’m confident we* would find more anti-women women then anti-woman men in the ultra scene, counting publications, podcasts and blogs. But I really don’t think an unwelcoming community has fuck-all to do with any of this.
Men and women, on average, simply have different preferences. I know of no structural barriers keeping more men from working as elementary-school teachers or dental hygienists, yet almost none do.
It’s possible this stuff just works itself out in an overwhelmingly organic way.
It’s also impossible to ignore the fact that many, maybe most, of the voices who believe women are being discriminated against in ultramarathons are eager to classify men who decide to call themselves women as genuine women. Not only is this invalid on its face, but it also makes proper accounting impossible. It means that, on paper (or screen), the ultra scene could one day see a 50/50 male/female split despite only 20 percent of the “females” having testes. Is this supposed to be part of the plan?
Returning to “runtothefinish,” here’s more wisdom from that account:
There are more problems with the list on the left than seem possible given its length, depending on the stringency of a given observer. First, carbs don’t “store” glycogen; glycogen is a storage form of glucose, the carbohydrate and molecule every cell in your body uses to generate energy. And when someone can’t spell “serotonin” correctly, apart from other issues, it undermines confidence even in relatively running-naive readers that the writer has a real grasp on the material.
Her goofs notwithstanding, I don’t consider this coach to be a jerk or anything. She’s just clueless and a bad communicator. Why 118,000 people are tuning into the account is a mystery, but anyone who claims to be a running expert and coach and spends enough time on social-media accounts will eventually “become” an expert and coach.
Returning to the grifters and loudmouths, anyone who’s low on the hotness scale and considers themselves ethnically brown is simply a guru across subjects by Wokish consecration, yet another wrong-side-of-history fiat. But most of the highly visible people in running are affluent and white, and accordingly, this crew is contributing the bulk of the ineptitude, pointless podcasts, editorial jetsam, and seditious, vandalistic prevaricating.
Once again for the pure narcissists waving wildly in the front row: If you shout garbage through a megaphone, some people will yell back at you. When you dismiss a valid observation as that of someone belonging to “the old boys’ club,” you have picked a fight, and if you write things like “My perspective has changed due to the visibility I have and the vastness to which my sport has risen” in the course of writing a barely readable essay aggressively broadcasting your serially unaddressed issues, you have made your chin a massive target in that fight. I do, after all, embrace the genial sin of pride on a regular basis.
The Internet is not a safe space or a clearinghouse for uproarious claptrap and calumnies to stand unchallenged. It is also not the dry-erase board some might automatically regard it as because they never revisit their old, now-ridiculous-looking ideas—output that was messy and the time and remains so even individual actors are protected by many misguided people having helped sling the muck around.
History will catch up to the folks flouting reality. They can hide their eyes from the glare of its beam, but the only way for them to pretend they were never part of the nonsense will be for them to stand in the shadows of bigger offenders. Which the 2023 sleaze-mongers of running will be eager to do, as some bad habits won’t have to change, even when runners are all “living” in the same tract-style mountain city eating vegan insects from Amazon-delivered MRE-like packets with Whole Foods logos on them.
Assume for simplicity that there were 10,000 ultrarunners in 2013. A 350% increase since would mean this number is 45,000 today. 16% of 45,000 is 7,200, and 7,200 is 72% of 10,000. This scenario would therefore hold if males accounted for every newcomer to the scene since 2013.