Women Have an Actual Superpower
By: Em Unravelling
Tags: Life Lessons, Women, Feminism, Running, Life

Have you heard of the Montane Spine Race?

No, I hadn’t either. But it definitely exists, and it’s a growling beast of an endurance race, possibly the hardest race out there. It’s called the Spine Race because it traces the backbone of England, along 268 gruelling mountain miles with 43,000 feet of climbing (cumulatively more than the height of Everest), and it’s held in the bleakest depths of winter.

I can’t even imagine it. (I did less than a tenth of that distance on comfortable flat roads in mild April breezes last year, and that was punishing enough). Nevertheless, there are plenty of people who can imagine it, and who apply in their eager droves each year. It’s a very popular niche event among people who love to push themselves to the absolute limit.

Last year, the outright winner of the Montane Spine Race was Jasmin Paris, a vet from Edinburgh who is an experienced endurance runner. She completed the 268-mile distance in a staggering 83 hours, 12 minutes and 33 seconds. She spent only 7 hours of that time sleeping or eating. Most of the time she was running on mountains, often in the dark with a head torch, and able only to see a few metres in front of her pounding feet.

She won the race. But she didn’t just win, she broke the course record for the race. And she didn’t just break it, she smashed it.

She knocked 12 whole hours off the previous record, which had been set in 2016 by a man named Eoin Keith. If that’s not impressive enough, consider this: the previous year’s winner, a man named Eugeni Rossello Sole, was so intent on catching her that he had to drop out of the race, exhausted, only 4 miles from its end.

And twenty hours after Jasmin finished running, only two other people — both men — had also finished the race. Everyone else had either been forced by injury or exhaustion to retire, or had not yet reached the finish line.

Oh, I forgot to mention.

Jasmin was still breastfeeding her toddler at the time of the race, and she expressed breast milk at four out of the five checkpoints on the route.

It’s impressive stuff. Genuinely, mind-blowingly impressive.

Which makes it all the more baffling that until recently, women were very rarely represented in endurance running. And as recently as the 1970s, women were not even officially allowed to run marathons — it was widely and genuinely believed that our bodies could not cope with the strain.

It’s staggering now to think that it was only in 1972 — less than fifty years ago — that female entries were finally permitted to the world-famous Boston marathon.

As running exploded in popularity over recent decades, women’s access to it still lagged behind. Ultramarathons (defined as any race longer than 26.2 miles) and long endurance events were inevitably full of male competitors, and again it seemed to be just assumed that as women, we wouldn’t be able to hack the grind.

After all, overall the distances up to and including the marathon, men are faster. It’s a biological fact: they have bigger muscles and they have greater maximal capacities (such as strength and aerobic power). We can’t beat men on a twenty-mile race track.

Over sixty miles on some cold hills, though? We’ve got a definite shout. We’ve got more than a shout, in fact. And that’s because women are more appropriately built for endurance than men are.

We have a greater distribution of slow-twitch muscle fibres. Slow-twitch muscle fibres give us an endurance advantage because they’re more resistant to fatigue. We are also, typically, more mentally resilient. We have a different mindset.

We are genuinely happy with a “slow and steady” start, whereas our male counterparts will often zoom off with competition at the forefront of their minds, and tire themselves within the first few hours.

Scientists doing research in this area — although they have not yet managed to study enough men and women side by side to draw full conclusions — have also noted that women often report that the experience of enduring childbirth and the sleep deprivation of parenting small babies feed into their ability to perform well over an endurance event.

Also, as women we cope with exhaustion in a very different way to men — a more emotion-focused way that helps, it would seem, in long races.

“When we think about ultra-endurance events, one of the things that’s quite prevalent is emotions because you get fatigue, sleep deprivation and tiredness and that causes things like confusion and less helpful emotional responses. “Typically females use more emotion-focused coping so they focus more on how to reframe what they are feeling than males in general. That might be a reason why they may be more suited to those more ultra-endurance events.” — Dr Carla Meijen

So our superpower, our strength, comes not just from our extra slow-twitch muscle fibres (useful as they are!), but in our ability to endure. In our often-demonstrated ability to keep plodding on in the face of adversity, maintaining an intense focus on our goals despite utter fatigue.

As women, we always knew this, but it’s finally becoming officially recognised. And it’s about time.

Turns out, no one knew we were stronger than men — because they hadn’t let us go far enough yet.