Abstract
Recent studies investigating elite and master athletes in pool- and long-distance open-water swimming showed for elite swimmers that the fastest women were able to outperform the fastest men, and for master athletes that elderly women were able to achieve a similar performance to elderly men. The present study investigating age group records in runners from 5 km to 6 days aimed to test this hypothesis for master runners. Data from the American Master Road Running Records were analyzed, for 5 km, 8 km, 10 km, 10 miles, 20 km, half-marathon, 25 km, 30 km, marathon, 50 km, 50 miles, 100 km, 100 miles, 12 h, 24 h, 48 h and 144 h, for athletes in age groups ranging from 40 to 99 years old. The performance gap between men and women showed higher effects in events lengthening from 5 km to 10 miles (d = 0.617) and lower effects in events lengthening from 12 to 144 h (d = 0.304) running. Both other groups showed similar effects, being 20 km to the marathon (d = 0.607) and 50 km to 100 miles (d = 0.563). The performance gap between men and women showed higher effects in the age groups 85 years and above (d = 0.953) followed by 55 to 69 years (d = 0.633), and lower effects for the age groups 40 to 54 years (d = 0.558) and 70 to 84 years (d = 0.508). In summary, men are faster than women in American road running events, however, the sex gap decreases with increasing age but not with increasing event length.
Highlights
Sport performance differences between men and women have been previously reported in several different modalities, such as in open-water swimming, in marathon running and in Ironman triathlon [1,2,3,4]
Another report showed that the sex gap decreased with increasing age in marathon runners [1]
The comparisons of running speed between men and women were significantly different in all endurance events for all age groups
Summary
Sport performance differences between men and women have been previously reported in several different modalities, such as in open-water swimming, in marathon running and in Ironman triathlon [1,2,3,4]. In ultra-endurance road races, women seem to have a higher range of peak performance than men (30–54 years vs 30–49 years) but the peak of age-related performance decline was similar between them (60–64 years) [13] For master athletes, it seems that elderly women can reach the performance of elderly men, especially in pool and open-water swimming. Recent studies investigating master pool swimmers in freestyle [14], backstroke [15], butterfly [16], breaststroke [17], individual medley [14], and open-water [18] swimming showed that women in the older age groups (i.e., older than 75 years) achieved a similar performance to men. We hypothesized, based on recent findings for elite and master pool- and long-distance swimmers, that the longer the length and/or higher the age the smaller the sex difference would be
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