Word: marathonical
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...decades, running enthusiasts have speculated that women were better suited for distance running than men because of their higher body-fat ratios - hence a greater emergency fuel store. A look at marathon times between men and women appears to bolster the theory. As more and more women have taken up distance running, the gap between the world's best men's marathon time and the world's best women's time has steadily narrowed. Tim Noakes, professor of exercise and sports science at the University of Cape Town, explains surprising recent findings about a popular athletic debate...
...Will women ever run a marathon faster than...
There was some speculation many years ago, in the 1970s, that because women had greater fat stores, they would outlast men in long-distance events. We have a famous race in South Africa, the 90-km (56-mi) Comrades marathon. Some years ago we wrote a paper in which we made the case that if a man and a woman could run a [standard 42-km (26-mi)] marathon in the same time, the woman would likely win the longer Comrades race by about an hour. She'd be about an hour faster...
Then we realized what the problem was. When you look at most recreational runners, men and women are not the same size. If you compare a man and a woman both running three-hour marathons, for example, you generally find that the man is about 10 kg (22 lbs) heavier, or maybe even more. But when we measured the world's best athletes, we found that the men and the women were roughly the same weight. So, the female world-record holder in the marathon is about 54 kg (119 lbs) and the male world-record holder is about...
...books about the runner tackle in very different ways the paucity of behind-the-scenes substance and the absence of telling interviews with the man himself. In Barefoot Runner: The Life of Marathon Champion Abebe Bikila, former rock journalist Paul Rambali weaves a powerful narrative through a series of vignettes. The book, just out in paperback, makes liberal use of fictionalizing devices - interior monologues, imagined conversations - that render it less reliable as a historical account, but help to capture the drama of Bikila's life. It's hard to read Rambali's well-paced description of the Rome race without...