14 ms·

A woman who outruns men, 200 miles at a time

42 points by rusbus 8y ago

tzury 8y ago
I saw her first at Joe Rogan's podcast[1]. Far beyond the athletic achievement, I was amazed by her humility, how modest was she was during the entire conversation! [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8DfjXnIk6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8DfjXnIk6c
- sysalphUS 8y ago
  I really found her modesty refreshing. If you’d like to hear more, she’s also on the Humans of Ultrarunning Poscast episode 1. One thing that stands out is her absence of formal structure and training plan. She just really enjoys running and does what her body is up for at any given day for in training. http://humansofultrarunning.com/episode-1-courtney-dauwalter-ultrarunner-who-loves-the-pain-crushes-competition-in-any-ultra-distance-and-shes-just-getting-started/ http://humansofultrarunning.com/episode-1-courtney-dauwalter...
  - feketegy 8y ago
    Well, I don't know about that, on the Rogan podcast at one point she mentioned that one time she actually temporarily got blind of the exhaustion, but still kept running, so clearly her body was not up for it, but she was/is "crazy" enough not to stop.
    - sysalphUS 8y ago
      I’m pretty sure that was during the actual 240 mile race. Not training.
- educationdata 8y ago
  Anybody also feel there is some sort of similarity between the way how she talks and Elon Mask? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycPr5-27vSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycPr5-27vSI
prepend 8y ago
This is cool. I think it will be helpful to have more sports that don’t have gender or sex separated categories and finding activities where there aren’t biological advantages is important.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
  Why? Virtually all sports (including this one - see the comment from travisoneill1) have gender-related biological differences one way or the other. Why try to minimize this fact?
  - warent 8y ago
    It has nothing to do with minimizing anything. Sometimes it's just cool to see men and women compete at things they can be equals at, e.g. business, right? So, acknowledging that men and women have biological differences, I'd still like to see more things we can equally compete in, just for the entertainment/competitive spirit if nothing else. EDIT: Although gp did say it would be "helpful." So, yeah, I don't know what they meant by that, but this is my take on it anyhow.
    - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
      A problem with this is that 'equal' tends to equate to fields where measuring performance is not really possible in an objective fashion. E.g. - how would you measure business performance? Is Bill Gates a Bobby Fischer of business, or is he a smart guy who had a great run of right place/right time? In reality there's a good reason that most competitive fields are not equal by any means. In many fields there are even racial/ethnic divides where physiological differences tend to be much smaller than those between sexes. It's because while any world class competitor (in anything) might be many orders of magnitude more capable than a layperson, in general the differences between the individuals at the top is very small. Because of this even the slightest difference is something that can radically shift the balance. As an example consider the LZR swimsuit [1] by Speedo. In the Beijing Olympics 23 of 25 world records broken were done by swimmers wearing an LZR suit. It had such a huge impact on swimming that the suit is now banned, along with possible derivatives of it. You might expect it's some amazing insta-swimmer, but it's just a regular swimsuit that's nicely engineered resulting in about a quarter less drag than their previous swimsuit. But these changes alone enabled swimmers to shave an average of about 2% off their lap times, which was way more than enough to just destroy just about all previous records. The ratios of your hips, legs, weight distributions, etc all are vastly different between men and women. And different, though less so, between races. Even consider all the physical differences implied by simply having breasts. Occasionally you'll find a genetic outlier, but in cases where the normal distribution tends to overlap strongly with the ideal performance distribution you're going to get a landslide of results. For instance Kenya makes up a tiny chunk of the world's population, but dominates pretty much all marathon running competitions. Even more interesting is it's not just Kenyans, but a tiny ethnic minority within Kenya that's doing this dominating. Some 0.06% of the world's population ends up dominating marathon racing. Most tellingly, Kenya was basically a nonplayer in these events until cultural changes in the 80s started bringing Kenya (and other East African nations) up to the standards of the west in terms of nutrition and general technology. There was a great article on this all a while back [2]. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZR_Racer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZR_Racer [2] - https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/why-kenyans-make-such-great-runners-a-story-of-genes-and-cultures/256015/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/wh...
newnewpdro 8y ago
Her Moab 240 pace wasn't actually that competitive, the exception is she didn't sleep. It will be interesting to see what this does to the sport, if it ends up becoming as much about performing for days without sleep as being physically capable of running 200+ miles.
- patejam 8y ago
  Isn't that the point? Endurance vs strength/speed. Endurance includes not needing to rest as much as the rest of the field.
  - newnewpdro 8y ago
    I didn't say she cheated, it's well within the rules to skip sleeping. It's just not something the competition has been doing, and I suspect it's largely out of self-preservation rather than a lack of ability. Sleep deprivation is not particularly good for the brain. Now that Courtney has demonstrated this strategy, and how impossible it is for even the fastest of distance runners to beat it if they sleep, I expect ultramarathons to become a bunch of sleep-stumblers after the first day in the future. Which makes it not really about distance running anymore. It's more like a run followed by a long tired hallucination-ridden hike.
    - bloomer 8y ago
      Yeah that is the exact strategy employed by 61 year old Cliff Young linked above, slow pace and no sleep. The article notes that is the strategy everyone uses now in that race as well. Also he was not competitive the second year.
    - anonymfus 8y ago
      Maybe if make it a week long competition then sleeping well will be a good strategy?
      - newnewpdro 8y ago
        The organizers could just require a minimum number of hours spent stationary if they're interested in preserving the running aspect of the race, and not alienating athletes who have no interest in subjecting themselves to extreme sleep deprivation. It should probably be a separate class.
mindcrime 8y ago
FWIW, women beating men in ultra-marathon length events isn't a new thing. Pam Reed won the Badwater Ultramarathon[1] outright in 2002 and 2003. More insights on this topic can be found here: https://trailrunnermag.com/people/is-women-winning-ultras-overall-a-trend.html https://trailrunnermag.com/people/is-women-winning-ultras-ov... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badwater_Ultramarathon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badwater_Ultramarathon
- flukus 8y ago
  There was also that time a 61 year old farmer beat world class athletes in a 543 mile race: https://elitefeet.com/the-legend-of-cliff-young https://elitefeet.com/the-legend-of-cliff-young Efficiency is the most important factor.
  - dagw 8y ago
    Of course the follow up to that story is that once those world class athletes saw and copied his strategy of keeping a slow pace and avoiding sleep they soundly beat him in every other race he entered.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
starpilot 8y ago
Would LOVE to see this as a summer Olympic sport. Talk about testing the absolute limits of human ability.
- LanceH 8y ago
  If you like a sport, don't wish the olympics on it.
travisoneill1 8y ago
Interesting topic. Terrible reporting. Conclusion is contradicted by the data: http://www.iau-ultramarathon.org/images/file/Records/2017_2020_RecordsTable20181124.pdf http://www.iau-ultramarathon.org/images/file/Records/2017_20...
- loeg 8y ago
  Yeah, it seems there is some relationship between hip width and running efficiency. (Wider hips create an angle between knee and hip, whereas narrower hips the leg extends basically straight down in front profile.) So if you're a woman with relatively narrow hips, great, you've got a chance of keeping up with the men over 100s of miles. But many women have wider hips than most men.
tasuki 8y ago
The numbers for 2017 Moab 240 don't seem reasonable to me: She ran the 238 miles in 58 hours. That's 4.1 mph. She beat the next competitor for 10 hours or 20 miles. Now let's focus on the competitor... If 10 hours is 20 miles that's 2 mph for the last 10 miles. First, that's not running, that's not even walking. I walk about 3.5 mph. So either the competitor spent a couple hours in bed or it doesn't check out at all. It'd also mean the competitor ran at 3.75 mph for the first 218 miles. Did they lose almost half the speed for the last 20 miles?
- feketegy 8y ago
  Listen to the Joe Rogan podcast with her, nobody can run non-stop for the full 240 miles. They sleep, rest even if for 10 - 20 minutes. She was also resting, but on average she stopped fewer times than anybody else in the race. Also, Moab is not like a marathon, it's rough terrain, so you can't possibly run with full force, like on a marathon flat surface. Look at the terrain they're running on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YseTVpI4R5U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YseTVpI4R5U
- rapsey 8y ago
  They probably sleep for some time at some point as well.
- nzjrs 8y ago
  It's that she didn't* sleep (see comments below)

42 points by rusbus 8y ago

I saw her first at Joe Rogan's podcast[1]. Far beyond the athletic achievement, I was amazed by her humility, how modest was she was during the entire conversation! [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8DfjXnIk6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8DfjXnIk6c

sysalphUS 8y ago
I really found her modesty refreshing. If you’d like to hear more, she’s also on the Humans of Ultrarunning Poscast episode 1. One thing that stands out is her absence of formal structure and training plan. She just really enjoys running and does what her body is up for at any given day for in training. http://humansofultrarunning.com/episode-1-courtney-dauwalter-ultrarunner-who-loves-the-pain-crushes-competition-in-any-ultra-distance-and-shes-just-getting-started/ http://humansofultrarunning.com/episode-1-courtney-dauwalter...
- feketegy 8y ago
  Well, I don't know about that, on the Rogan podcast at one point she mentioned that one time she actually temporarily got blind of the exhaustion, but still kept running, so clearly her body was not up for it, but she was/is "crazy" enough not to stop.
  - sysalphUS 8y ago
    I’m pretty sure that was during the actual 240 mile race. Not training.
educationdata 8y ago
Anybody also feel there is some sort of similarity between the way how she talks and Elon Mask? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycPr5-27vSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycPr5-27vSI

prepend 8y ago

This is cool. I think it will be helpful to have more sports that don’t have gender or sex separated categories and finding activities where there aren’t biological advantages is important.

hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
Why? Virtually all sports (including this one - see the comment from travisoneill1) have gender-related biological differences one way or the other. Why try to minimize this fact?
- warent 8y ago
  It has nothing to do with minimizing anything. Sometimes it's just cool to see men and women compete at things they can be equals at, e.g. business, right? So, acknowledging that men and women have biological differences, I'd still like to see more things we can equally compete in, just for the entertainment/competitive spirit if nothing else. EDIT: Although gp did say it would be "helpful." So, yeah, I don't know what they meant by that, but this is my take on it anyhow.
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    A problem with this is that 'equal' tends to equate to fields where measuring performance is not really possible in an objective fashion. E.g. - how would you measure business performance? Is Bill Gates a Bobby Fischer of business, or is he a smart guy who had a great run of right place/right time? In reality there's a good reason that most competitive fields are not equal by any means. In many fields there are even racial/ethnic divides where physiological differences tend to be much smaller than those between sexes. It's because while any world class competitor (in anything) might be many orders of magnitude more capable than a layperson, in general the differences between the individuals at the top is very small. Because of this even the slightest difference is something that can radically shift the balance. As an example consider the LZR swimsuit [1] by Speedo. In the Beijing Olympics 23 of 25 world records broken were done by swimmers wearing an LZR suit. It had such a huge impact on swimming that the suit is now banned, along with possible derivatives of it. You might expect it's some amazing insta-swimmer, but it's just a regular swimsuit that's nicely engineered resulting in about a quarter less drag than their previous swimsuit. But these changes alone enabled swimmers to shave an average of about 2% off their lap times, which was way more than enough to just destroy just about all previous records. The ratios of your hips, legs, weight distributions, etc all are vastly different between men and women. And different, though less so, between races. Even consider all the physical differences implied by simply having breasts. Occasionally you'll find a genetic outlier, but in cases where the normal distribution tends to overlap strongly with the ideal performance distribution you're going to get a landslide of results. For instance Kenya makes up a tiny chunk of the world's population, but dominates pretty much all marathon running competitions. Even more interesting is it's not just Kenyans, but a tiny ethnic minority within Kenya that's doing this dominating. Some 0.06% of the world's population ends up dominating marathon racing. Most tellingly, Kenya was basically a nonplayer in these events until cultural changes in the 80s started bringing Kenya (and other East African nations) up to the standards of the west in terms of nutrition and general technology. There was a great article on this all a while back [2]. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZR_Racer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZR_Racer [2] - https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/why-kenyans-make-such-great-runners-a-story-of-genes-and-cultures/256015/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/wh...

newnewpdro 8y ago

Her Moab 240 pace wasn't actually that competitive, the exception is she didn't sleep. It will be interesting to see what this does to the sport, if it ends up becoming as much about performing for days without sleep as being physically capable of running 200+ miles.

patejam 8y ago
Isn't that the point? Endurance vs strength/speed. Endurance includes not needing to rest as much as the rest of the field.
- newnewpdro 8y ago
  I didn't say she cheated, it's well within the rules to skip sleeping. It's just not something the competition has been doing, and I suspect it's largely out of self-preservation rather than a lack of ability. Sleep deprivation is not particularly good for the brain. Now that Courtney has demonstrated this strategy, and how impossible it is for even the fastest of distance runners to beat it if they sleep, I expect ultramarathons to become a bunch of sleep-stumblers after the first day in the future. Which makes it not really about distance running anymore. It's more like a run followed by a long tired hallucination-ridden hike.
  - bloomer 8y ago
    Yeah that is the exact strategy employed by 61 year old Cliff Young linked above, slow pace and no sleep. The article notes that is the strategy everyone uses now in that race as well. Also he was not competitive the second year.
  - anonymfus 8y ago
    Maybe if make it a week long competition then sleeping well will be a good strategy?
    - newnewpdro 8y ago
      The organizers could just require a minimum number of hours spent stationary if they're interested in preserving the running aspect of the race, and not alienating athletes who have no interest in subjecting themselves to extreme sleep deprivation. It should probably be a separate class.

mindcrime 8y ago

FWIW, women beating men in ultra-marathon length events isn't a new thing. Pam Reed won the Badwater Ultramarathon[1] outright in 2002 and 2003. More insights on this topic can be found here: https://trailrunnermag.com/people/is-women-winning-ultras-overall-a-trend.html https://trailrunnermag.com/people/is-women-winning-ultras-ov... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badwater_Ultramarathon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badwater_Ultramarathon

flukus 8y ago
There was also that time a 61 year old farmer beat world class athletes in a 543 mile race: https://elitefeet.com/the-legend-of-cliff-young https://elitefeet.com/the-legend-of-cliff-young Efficiency is the most important factor.
- dagw 8y ago
  Of course the follow up to that story is that once those world class athletes saw and copied his strategy of keeping a slow pace and avoiding sleep they soundly beat him in every other race he entered.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

starpilot 8y ago

Would LOVE to see this as a summer Olympic sport. Talk about testing the absolute limits of human ability.

LanceH 8y ago
If you like a sport, don't wish the olympics on it.

travisoneill1 8y ago

Interesting topic. Terrible reporting. Conclusion is contradicted by the data: http://www.iau-ultramarathon.org/images/file/Records/2017_2020_RecordsTable20181124.pdf http://www.iau-ultramarathon.org/images/file/Records/2017_20...

loeg 8y ago
Yeah, it seems there is some relationship between hip width and running efficiency. (Wider hips create an angle between knee and hip, whereas narrower hips the leg extends basically straight down in front profile.) So if you're a woman with relatively narrow hips, great, you've got a chance of keeping up with the men over 100s of miles. But many women have wider hips than most men.

tasuki 8y ago

The numbers for 2017 Moab 240 don't seem reasonable to me: She ran the 238 miles in 58 hours. That's 4.1 mph. She beat the next competitor for 10 hours or 20 miles. Now let's focus on the competitor... If 10 hours is 20 miles that's 2 mph for the last 10 miles. First, that's not running, that's not even walking. I walk about 3.5 mph. So either the competitor spent a couple hours in bed or it doesn't check out at all. It'd also mean the competitor ran at 3.75 mph for the first 218 miles. Did they lose almost half the speed for the last 20 miles?

feketegy 8y ago
Listen to the Joe Rogan podcast with her, nobody can run non-stop for the full 240 miles. They sleep, rest even if for 10 - 20 minutes. She was also resting, but on average she stopped fewer times than anybody else in the race. Also, Moab is not like a marathon, it's rough terrain, so you can't possibly run with full force, like on a marathon flat surface. Look at the terrain they're running on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YseTVpI4R5U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YseTVpI4R5U
rapsey 8y ago
They probably sleep for some time at some point as well.
nzjrs 8y ago
It's that she didn't* sleep (see comments below)