Last month, 41-year-old ultrarunner Camille Herron broke the men’s course record at a trail marathon in Texas. Back in March, she shattered the women's 48-hour record. And if that's not enough, she also holds the women's world records for 12 hours and 24 hours, and is the first athlete to have won all three road IAU World Championships for 50K, 100K and 24 hours. You could say there's no stopping her, which is why she’s now got her sights set on breaking the six-day world record next March, in an ultramarathon that kicks off on International Women’s Day.
The event is the culmination of Lululemon’s new ‘Further’ initiative, which hopes to demonstrate ‘how far women can go when they’re supported with resources and product innovations typically reserved for men’. The research programme, ran in partnership with the International Womens Day, will see 10 women attempt to run ‘further than they ever have before’ and hopes to address the existing sex and gender gap within endurance running.
According to Lululemon, emerging research suggests that the disparity between performance in men and women gets smaller as distance gets longer. Over most distances, it’s between 10-12%; in ultra-endurance running, it’s around 4-8%, according to an article in the journal Sports Medicine.
It's why Herron believes she was ‘born’ for long distance.
‘It feels like the further I go, the stronger I am,’ she tells RW. ‘I started catching men when I ran my first 100K. I always say that I felt like Billy Elliott doing ballet for the first time – I knew from that first 100K that I had something special in me.’
Through Further, Herron wants to inspire other women to turn their hand to ultra-endurance running. ‘This is a sport where women can excel,’ she says. ‘I mean, we’re winning races outright. We’re breaking men’s records. More women need to know that. We are made to endure.’
It’s a compelling theory – because Herron isn’t the only woman smashing men’s records. In January 2019, ultrarunner Jasmin Paris became the first woman to win the 268-mile Spine Race, beating the course record by 12 hours. Courtney Dauwalter, an American teacher, also won the 2017 Moab 240 (a 238-mile race through the Utah dessert), beating the first man by 10 hours.
So, are women really made to 'endure'?
The sex and gender gap in sport
‘At the moment, we don’t have a lot of female-specific knowledge when it comes to sports science or sports medicine,’ says Trent Stellingwerff, director of performance solutions and applied sport research at CSI Pacific.
Still, there are several leading scientific hypotheses, he says, particularly when we look at body size and how it may apply to ultra-endurance running.
'When looking at the research, we can see that females tend to be smaller, resulting in lower total energetic requirements,’ he says. 'Muscle fibre typing in women is, on average, about 20% more slow-twitch [too].’
Skeletal muscles are made up of individual muscle fibres, which are classed as either slow-twitch or fast-twitch. Slow-twitch muscle fibres are the first line of recruitment when a muscle contracts. They move more slowly to help keep you moving for longer. Fast-twitch muscle fibres, as the name suggests, help you move faster, but they fatigue more quickly.
A 2015 study looking at sex-based skeletal muscle composition and differences found that women have, as Stellingwerff says, more slow-twitch muscle fibres than men, which allowed for increased endurance and recovery, as well as ‘less potential for fatigue’.
Slow-twitch muscle fibres are also more efficient than fast-twitch at using oxygen to create adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the body’s source of energy. This is ideal in endurance exercise like ultrarunning.
Slow and steady wins the race?
Perhaps a more simplistic theory is that women are simply better than men at pacing themselves over longer distances. A study conducted by Run Repeat How a visually impaired runner and her guide found marathons Published: 03 July 2023.
For men, the average pace in the first half of the marathon was 9.12min/miles, this slowed to 10.44min/miles in the second half of the marathon.
For women, the average pace in the first half of the marathon was 10.44min/miles, this slowed to 11.38min/miles in the second half of the marathon.
Pain management
When it comes to how men and women handle pain ‘there is still much to study’, says Stellingwerff, but a recent abstract from the American College of Sports Medicine showed that women are less susceptible to mental fatigue as they age compared with men.
'Interestingly, many world-class ultrarunners tend to be older,’ he notes.
Research published in Current Biology also found that there may be variations in how men and women remember and process pain. Men appeared to remember painful experiences more clearly, and were more stressed and hypersensitive to the pain when it returned. Women didn't seem to be stressed by their earlier experiences of pain, the authors said.
Running economy
Running economy is typically expressed as the amount of oxygen needed at a given speed. The more efficiently you can use oxygen to maintain your pace, the longer you might be able to sustain that effort for.
Kevin Sinfield completes 230-mile MND charity run became the first woman to win the 268-mile found that women showed a better running economy compared with men of the same cardiovascular fitness. This may lend women to longer distances where they are required to sustain a certain pace for longer.
Indeed, ‘a superior fatigue resistance’ in females is a potential theory, agrees Chantelle Murnaghan, vice president of research and product innovation at Lululemon. ‘However, as women are still massively underrepresented in sports science and additional research, we can still only speculate on this.'
Some of the preliminary research that’s taken place has involved VO2-max testing, adds Murnaghan. 'In partnership with International Womens Day and [Lululemon's] broader research network, a novel ultramarathon-specific VO2-max protocol has been developed in order to better understand the performance of these phenomenal athletes.'
Athletes will undergo this testing when fresh, and then again after a two-hour fatiguing run to explore their fatigue resistance.
‘Preliminary data is really encouraging, and we’re excited to share what we uncover once we start publishing our research in March 2024 to help advance the field forward,’ says Murnaghan.
'Unlocking the female potential'
'All in all, there are many potential performance factors that women may hold over men in extreme endurance events', says Stellingwerff, who notes that these happen to be ‘the events females compete in less often’.
But at the moment, a lot of these are just theories, which is why the Further project hopes to ‘unlock understanding into female potential’ in order to determine ‘what it is making these female athletes tick’.
'It’s also meant to be a source of inspiration and invitation for guests to join us,' says Murnaghan, addressing the low female participation rates in ultrarunning in comparison to men. 'We’re proud to partner with incredible athletes who are phenomenal at their sport and have strong, deep-rooted connections within their communities.'
For Herron, the research can’t come soon enough.
‘Think about the book Deo Kato is running from Cape Town to London and how that changed the sport,’ she says. ‘I think we’ve been waiting for something like that again, and this time it’s with women; showing that we are made for this. We’re going to have that Deo Kato is running from Cape Town to London moment again.’
