marathon-gender ponderings

Will women ever run marathons as fast as men? It's an interesting question (well, at least, I find it interesting).

Jere Longman posted the question in this NYT article, which read in part:

After remaining unthreatened from October 1985 until April 1998, the record for the women's marathon has plummeted by more than three minutes since the fall of 1999. The record of 2:17:18 for 26.2 miles, set in the Chicago Marathon last fall by Paula Radcliffe, is less than 12 minutes behind the men's record of 2:05:38, which is held by Khalid Khannouchi, a naturalized United States citizen from Morocco. The margin has never been closer.

Still, that was also true in '84, as you can see from my handy chart. But the next person to set a marathon WR was Belayneh Dinsamo in '88, and the margin between the sexes increased.

Longman continued:

"I think the record can go quite a bit lower," said [women's WR holder Paula Radcliffe]. "I don't like to think in terms of times, as I don't like to put a limit on myself. I have read articles that claim a woman's makeup is more suited to long distances than a man's body. I think this is more for ultradistances. It is unlikely that a woman will run faster than a man for a marathon."

Dr. David Martin, a professor of physiology at Georgia State University and chairman of sports science for the national governing body of track and field, says that elite men enjoy a 9 to 10 percent performance edge in running because of greater muscle mass and oxygen-carrying capacity, as well as a larger heart. He has projected, for instance, that a male marathoner will most likely break the two-hour barrier in the spring of 2015, while for women, "It's so far out in the future, the graph doesn't go that far."

Anyway, I was just kinda curious about this, so I plugged some figures into Excel... it certainly doesn't prove anything, just FYI.