Forty years ago, at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, American distance runner Joan Benoit Samuelson became the first woman to win an Olympic gold medal in the marathon, posting a blazing time of 2:24:52. It was an astonishing feat — but not because it proved that women could complete 26.2 miles at pace (in the first modern Olympic Games, Greek woman Stamata Revithi ran the men’s only marathon course the day after the race). It proved women could run the mileage on a competitive world stage in a remarkably fast time, for anyone. After all, the men’s debut marathon time in the 1896 Olympics in Greece was 2:58:50, no one broke 2:30:00 until 1936, and the men’s race in the first year women were allowed to officially participate (when Joan Benoit Samuelson captured gold) was less than 15 minutes faster.
Since 1984, women’s marathon times have dropped significantly, not just on the Olympic stage, but at world championships and major marathons like Boston, Berlin, Chicago, and Tokyo, to name a few. Over the past couple of decades especially, women have continued to bring down marathon times at a rate not seen in other running events. A few experts have noted that, statistically speaking, if the drop continues, women's times may even best that of the men’s race. Others cite the physical limitations put in place by biology.
While this summer’s Paris Olympic games are more likely to be about competing for medals than racing against the clock, the finishing times for both men and women will undoubtedly be fast — and close. While men have historically garnered the fastest times in just about every event that women and men both compete in, could the marathon finally break that mold?
1998, The Record Year That Never Was
In a January 1992 issue of the journal Nature, two exercise physiology researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles compared 70 years of men’s and women’s world records in the marathon, extrapolating and predicting if and when women would match and surpass men in the distance event. The results were surprising: By their estimate, women would surpass men in just six years.
The conclusion came from collected historical times for the world records for every standard Olympic running event from the 200-meter race through to the marathon from the start of the modern Olympic games for men. For women, researchers did the same thing, except they started in the 1920s, and they didn’t have enough data to chart the 5,000- and 10,000-meter races. They then calculated the mean running velocity for each event and tracked its progression over time. From there, they extrapolated what the world record time would be for events in the future based on the rates of progression.
From this data, they noted that over the course of the past 70 years, men’s times (for every event from 200 meters through the marathon) were getting faster at a steady, predictable rate. This was also true to some extent in some of the women’s events. But in the women’s marathon, things were different. Women were beating their previous times in this event at a far faster rate.
The authors noted that “unless the progression rate of men’s records increases relative to that of women, then [the mean running velocity] for these events will be no different for men and women within the first half of the twenty-first century. Beyond that time, current progression rates imply superior performance by women. The projected intersection for the marathon is 1998.”
The researchers predicted that women’s marathon times would surpass men's six years after this study was published.
In April 1998, Tegla Loroupe, a distance runner from Kenya, posted a new marathon world record in the Netherlands at the Rotterdam marathon, with a time of 2:20:47. That same year, Ronaldo da Costa of Brazil ran a time of 2:06:06 at the Berlin Marathon to beat the previous best men’s record.
In other words, rather than best men, the fastest female marathoner was a stubborn 14 minutes and 41 seconds slower. While the prediction of 1998 turned out to be false, the gap was still closing. In 1992, the difference between the top men and women in the marathon was 15 minutes and 36 seconds (2:08:07 for men and 2:23:43 for women). Slow progress, for sure, but progress no less. But what, exactly, did the researchers miss?
A 2015 article in the Journal of Applied Physiology laid it out clearly: The typical physical differences between men and women were holding back the times. “Recent improvements in record marathon times have been incremental and reflect more accurately the sex differences in physiology,” reads the article which was written by Sandra Hunter, who directs the Athletic and Human Performance Research Center at Marquette University, “that allow elite men to run faster than elite women.”
What we still don’t know about women’s physiology
The fact that the 1992 Nature article failed to take into account the physiological differences between women and men isn’t surprising when you take into account the decades of biases in sports science up to that point. Despite accounting for less than half the population, men’s bodies have long been the standard bearer for physical and biological study — meaning women have historically been excluded completely in clinical trials. As recently as 1977, the Food and Drug Administration was aggressively discriminating against women, creating a policy to exclude women of reproductive potential from Phase 1 and 2 clinical trials unless they had a life-threatening condition. It wasn’t until 1993 when Congress passed a law that required women to be subjects in clinical trials that we started seeing gains in our understanding of female physiology.
Even that was slow going, especially in sports performance research. A 2014 analysis in the European Journal of Sports Medicine found that in a collection of 1,382 sports performance studies, women made up just 3 percent of the study participants.
In terms of physiology and performance, scientists are still piecing together what drives fitness in men and women. On average, men have bigger muscles, hearts, and lungs, which helps create a high aerobic capacity. We know estrogen and testosterone play a role, but all the mechanisms haven’t been identified, and there are likely other anatomical and physiological mechanisms that haven’t been studied yet.
However, we know a few basics: Adult males typically have much more testosterone than adult females. Testosterone plays a key role in increasing muscle and bone mass as well as producing more red blood cells. The average adult male typically has more muscle mass than the average adult female. Body size, and thus organ size, also plays a role. Adult females, on average, have smaller lungs than adult males. This means their maximum oxygen consumption, also known as VO2 max, will be lower. All of this means that adult males likely have a more natural edge when it comes to running than adult females. And, when researchers have compared times for a number of different events, most women’s records are about 10 to 12 percent lower than men’s in the same event.
“There are always going to be these fundamental differences between males and females where the best male, under the right conditions, will outdo the best female,” Sandra Hunter, director of the Athletic and Human Performance Research Center at Marquette University, told Outside Magazine.
How Close Will We Get?
If we take this 10 to 12 percent handicap as a given — though more research could easily change things — just how much more will women gain on men in the marathon?
We might, in fact, be caught up. In that 2015 study, Hunter argued that the 2-hour equivalent marathon time for women has been achieved for 21 years now — by the now retired British distance runner, Paula Radcliffe in her 2003 world record marathon time of 2:15:25. In the paper, Hunter argues that if we are to assume the upper limit of 12 percent lower for women’s performance compared to men’s, then that makes Radcliffe’s time of 2:15:25 equivalent to 1:59:25 for a man.
Hunter then argued that if they weren’t conservative and went with a lower limit of 10 percent, then the women’s equivalent of a 2-hour marathon would be 2:12:00. The study was done in 2015, and in fact this last September, at the 2023 Berlin Marathon, Ethiopian distance runner Tigst Assefa set the latest world record at 2:11:53. That same year, the late Kelvin Kiptum set the men’s marathon world record time at the Chicago Marathon at just over 11 minutes faster at 2:00:35.
Science is never set in stone and it’s clear much, much more research is needed to fully understand human physiology and performance. But, if indeed we’ve already shattered that barrier, then what’s next for women? Part of the answer is staring us right in the face, in a different event: In the summer of 2023, professional ultra runner Courtney Dauwalter became the first person (male or female) to win the three premier ultra running events in one summer, the Western States 100, Hardrock 100, and The Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc (UTMB).
While Dauwalter’s performances were well recognized by media coverage, women have quietly been narrowing the gap between men and women — who compete together — in these longer, grueling races. Part of the allure of these events is that once you’ve passed a certain amount of miles — ultra races are technically anything longer than 26.2 but most are at least 50 miles, the most famously competitive ones are 100, and some are up to 200 miles or more — things that didn’t matter as much in an elite marathon race can make or break an ultrarace. Namely, nutrition, gastrointestinal distress, and mental fortitude.
Many of these elements, especially the mental aspect of running, haven’t been studied enough in men or women. In the past, in scientific research, mental health has not been studied as aggressively as other avenues, including in sports performance. Only recently have researchers begun to make a dent in both what enables so-called mental toughness and resilience, and how much of a difference that makes in performance.
But early results suggest science backs what professional and amateur athletes have long known to be true: the mind is a key player. For instance, one 2023 study looking at the impact of mental toughness and resilience in the performance of trail runners found that mental toughness was significantly associated with resilience and that better resilience lent itself to better performance. The study analyzed 307 Portuguese trail runners (60 were female and 247 were male) and used the Sports Mental Toughness Questionnaire to establish the athlete’s mental toughness levels and used the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale to ascertain resilience throughout the race. In total, mental toughness and resilience attributed to 21 percent performance variance in the trail runners.
There are already hints at this aspect of performance playing out in real time. Take Simone Biles. Back in the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, Biles dropped out of multiple events to prioritize her mental health. Four years later, at age 27, she has now won three gold medals and one silver at the Paris 2024 Olympics making her the most decorated female gymnast of all time. Now that it's clear mental health plays a key role in sport, the question becomes: How far can our minds take us?
