And people always say it's psychology. But I don't think so. At 65 kilometers, psychology isn't the issue. It's about physiology, not psychology. There's nothing your mind can do.
Women can play with pain.
At a recent National Institutes of Health conference on gender differences in pain, scientists reported that women appear to have lower pain thresholds than men but more ways of dealing with the discomfort. So while women may be more vulnerable to pain than men, they don't become disabled by it. In fact, men become more disabled by pain than women. For instance, hormones in both men and women interact with the brain and with stress, but women's hormones fluctuate more than men's, which affects our perception of pain. There are sex differences in brain structure, too.