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Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Woman's Only Races....absolute necessity now!

I always questioned the woman's-only races. While I do find myself drawn to them, are they truly appropriate? Granted, less than 2% of the races in the country are women-only, so its clearly a minority. But then this article....

Radcliffe's marathon world record invalidated


Why, you ask? Because she ran her 2:15 marathon world record with men in the same race! So, now her later 2:17 marathon record is considered the women's world record. This simply makes no sense!

The illogical logic behind all of this is that the fast men will push the women to run faster than they typically would...that whole adrenaline thing. But it appears to be quite one-sided and quite controversial!
  • all the women's races are being badmouthed as diminishing the value of female athletes...womens-only races are seen as girly and non-athletic events
  • very few women run in womens-only races....there are only a small percentage of races that fit this category
  • some percentage of the population believe this increase is simply because of that four-letter-equivalent word of feminism
“Ummmmmm, anybody know where I can find a 'Men's-only' road race? I didn't think so.... Feminism has succeeded in making men second class citizens...” Source
The other problem we now face is that it is illegal to disallow men from participating in womens-only races, e.g. the Disney Princess Half Marathon. While men are not encouraged to participate and the marketing is clearly for women, the race cannot say no to a man. So, where will this new ruling head? Will any womens-only race, where a single man participates, be disallowed as a record? Do men face the same issue? Apparently not, since they are typically ahead of the women and are not experiencing that push to go faster by another gender. Seems like we are going backwards here!

2 comments:

  1. Lala MamaSeptember 21, 2011 at 9:51 PM

    That's ridiculous. A run is a run is a run. As long as there is integrity in the timing of the race, Paula's record should stand as a world record!

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  2. NannySeptember 22, 2011 at 8:44 AM

    My sentiments exactly! Do the paid pacers also have to be female? The race organizers will do everything in their power to encourage world records, and now your crippling that effort...and essentially limiting the amount of prize money women will ever be afforded (as runners typically get a bonus if they make a course record and then even more if its a world record, so basically women elite runners will get paid a LOT less than before)

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