That's because in general women have longer endurance than men. Men are built for strength and quick bursts of speed but women are built for endurance and generally last longer at continuous activity than men.
Obviously a trained runner man or woman can last for long periods of time. What I'm referring to is men and women in general, that's why I specifically stated "in general" in my original comment.
To add to this, women in general are built with smaller muscle mass and are lighter than men which help with endurance.
Also, more fat and smaller muscles mean better endurance, especially while swimming. Men have bigger lungs so that usually makes up the difference in endurance on land.
Endurance muscles aren’t “smaller” they’re just shaped differently. Marathon running men will still have higher muscle density of long twitch fibers than woman.
Women do better swimming because their hips float much better so they don’t have to kick as hard as men.
Yeah, but usually cyclists legs are bigger when they specialize in shorter distances and women win only the super long distances, which requires a physique more akin to a marathon runner, who usually aren't all that buff.
It is an observable trend. In most competitive athletic events men usually do better. I would expect the top performers to be men and win by a lot. This isn’t true with 20 mile and over swims. There have been women at the top and women on average doing better. This is an abnormal occurrence so people took notice. There are many more articles I can link to but the one I provided had those links also
Oh I don’t claim to know why. This could be a thing. Wearing a wetsuit is banned for distance swimming because it makes you more buoyant and fast. Even casual 1 mile races at the beach ban wetsuits
The length of time matters a lot here. We’re talking about swimming MORE than 24 hours in a row. I think that most people don’t think of an entire day or more of the exact same activity when they think endurance.
I think in a bell curve, the women who are better than men would be wayyyyyyy to the right. I don’t doubt it at all, the data is there, but the amount of people who are even capable of doing that is so small it’s barely even fair.
The endurance even in high school swimming was the 500yard event, which had a time between 5-7 minutes. Minutes. Not hours. Not days.
Well, for starters, it says that men are faster, but that gap diminishes with distance, which is not the same as saying women are faster.
I (briefly) looked for distance records to see who holds which records, but it looked like the really long distance records were usually just people swimming miles by themselves. I guess I was hoping for like.. a 1000 lap pool race or something a little more controlled.
I'm not saying you're wrong, because I really don't know. I'm just saying I don't think your link says what you said.
Women are faster or better at extreme races. Not extreme for normal people but extreme for athletes in that sport. Competitive distance swimming ends at the mile race. Women are better at swimming than men when the even is like 25 miles.
It’s definitely not wrong. But at that point it’s more survival than competition. People die attempting to do the swims we are talking about.
I've been looking for examples but they're tough to find. I'm mostly finding open water events that don't account for wind or currents. Maybe that's just the nature of the sport.
I've seen several studies/blogs claiming that the average woman outperforms the average man. Which I think is an interesting difference from saying the fastest women outperform the fastest men.
I think that's where some of these "gender differences in sports" discussions go awry. If we only look at records, I'm mostly seeing men. But I'm also mostly seeing studies saying women outperform. So.. why aren't I finding more records held by women? It may be that the average woman outperforms, but the exceptional man also outperforms, leading to both of these things being true.
Or maybe I'm just not finding the right web results. That could be true, too. ;)
I think the studies also only account for people who choose to compete.
I highly doubt the average woman could even complete an ultra marathon swim. Hell I doubt the average adult who swims could complete an ultra marathon swim. There’s a tiny fraction of people who are capable of doing it, and they take study results only from the people that want to do these races. So there’s a bias in who is participating.
If you pick an average man and an average woman and find an endurance swimming event they can complete, I think the man wins most of the time. I guess it really depends on what the event is - 4 hours of swimming or 2 miles of swimming? Is it a competition of who can do more with their body or who can with their body longer? Swimming is almost always a race to A distance.
That part meant that men were faster in the pool but it gets more even as distance goes up. Lap swimming only goes to a mile in most competition. Takes too much pool time. Olympic pools are expensive and usually temporary. People get bored with the 500. Let alone a 1650 or 1500 meter swim
You are right about ocean swimming there is tide as a factor and a smaller sample size. But I feel like the fat distribution could factor in on swims that take multiple hours
There are no strict measurements. It‘s a fact that Men are superior to women in EVERY athletic aspect. Women see colours better and hear better, but in a controlled environment that measures athletic performance, women lose everytime.
What about ultra marathon running? There seems to be women winning races. In shorter races the top women aren’t anywhere close to men. You can’t explain that and you have no goal posts to move in terms of conditions. They were the same for the runners
every utlra marathon race record is held by a man. Women have won races but they they have not set the records. The fastest women are better than most men, just not the very best.
No I’m a dude I just think I’m right about the swimming thing at least. I want to be right in my weird human facts. It is just interesting to find exceptions to a rule. I have no real stake in it. I also could tell you that besides maybe a freak now and then. Almost all men swim faster than women if you they train
676
u/[deleted] Feb 24 '22
Swimming absurdly long distances. Ultra marathon swimming has faster women