The power dynamics of ultrarunning
Bethan Taylor-Swaine is the Feminist Sports Sociologist and wants to use ultra trail races as the starting point for conversations about a woman’s place in the world
It’s all right there in her handle of Feminist Sports Sociologist, but Bethan Taylor-Swaine talks about positioning herself as an activist academic. She wants to use the skills and knowledge she’s learnt from a PhD in Sports Psychology to effectively communicate the big issues facing us in ultrarunning, and offer some easy-to-digest solutions.
Ultrarunning then:
1650% increase in participation since 1996
350% increase in participation since 2010
Women are regularly half of the top 10 finishers
41% now run multiple ultras per year (up from 14%)
75% of participants are male
95% of participants are white - we’ll broach this bit more fully soon
To be clear: ~75% of ultrarunners are white males. The sport has the same level of diversity of the boardrooms at the American executive level. Whether you think that’s a good or a bad thing will determine how well you accept the information in the rest of this article.
It’s widely accepted that the more diverse a company is, the more profitable it is, so why isn’t there more diversity in the boardroom? It makes financial sense, after all. It’s literally the bottom line!
Power dynamics. Simple. Established leaders resist change.
I promise you that this is still about running. Running is, after all, a microcosm of wider society, and Western society is stuck in the 1800s as it continues to hover around the post-industrial ideals of Muscular Christianity, a religious movement characterized by “a belief in patriotic duty, discipline, self-sacrifice, masculinity, and the moral and physical beauty of athleticism.” It’s the idea of men being strong. It’s the idea of grit and determination being the key to sporting success. Sound familiar?
While sport has long been based on such unscientific ideas, there has been a recent sea change in understanding sports science (nutrition, rest, training intensity), but old ideas die hard.
“We're still heavily influenced by these narratives around sport being a man's space. Women who step over the boundary and enter this space are invaders of men’s turf. [Women] then start enacting compensatory behaviors. Women in ultra marathons, for example, talk a lot about being tough, gritty, and proving themselves. That's language we'd associate with the values of post-industrial society, built on masculine ideology.”
Women are better ultrarunners than men, though. Right?
“I look at ultrarunning in particular because it's promoted as a sport that can be equal, that women have as much opportunity as men, and everyone's on the same footing.”
When Courtney Dauwalter and Jasmin Paris win races outright, it’s high-profile news, so it’s become a very popular line that women begin to match men in the longest distances. There are some physiological and psychological reasons such as more slow-twitch muscle fibers, better emotion-focused coping mechanisms, and experiencing childbirth that might explain the female superiority but Bethan thinks that the headlines are due to “cherry-picked” data and a small sample size, due to only 600,000 ultrarunners worldwide.
“There just aren’t enough studies,” she says, and if you read beyond the headlines, the articles usually acknowledge that.
The problem with the narrative of women being better than men is that it allows organizers to rest on their laurels and not change anything about their races. If you recall that ultra race participants are majority white male, you’ll understand that there is still much work to be done to achieve parity.
It’s akin to calling the USA the wealthiest country in the world. It’s not true. While the average salary is over $65,000, the median salary in America (AKA the salary most representative of the population) is less than $50,000. That financial data is skewed by the large swath of billionaires using the USA as a violently deregulated tax haven, just as ultra podium data is skewed by a small handful of truly exceptional women.
“What's happening is that they are underselling how phenomenal these individuals are to do what they're doing.”
The barriers to parity in ultrarunning
“The challenge is that everyone wants to achieve parity, but nobody's willing to surrender any of their privilege.”
What’s the solution, then?
“Encouraging people - particularly men - to recognize that they are privileged. Privilege on a subconscious level is so often what's preventing change, because it goes back to wanting the power and that subconscious thing of wanting to protect your position.”
“You see it as well amongst women. Women need to recognize, in some cases, that they have privilege, and fail to see the bigger social picture of why women do and do not engage in sport.”
Bethan is referencing how women still have so much more hidden work in their lives, whether that is care and mental load at home, or proving themselves at work, or even where and when they’re able to run.
She’s open about her own privilege of being brought up in a family mindful of inequality, something that’s given her the confidence to go into spaces like The Speed Project. Taking a week off work and spending money flying around the world to run is a privilege, but Bethan doesn’t take it lightly.
“I essentially do what I want to do, but it's being aware that that is a really privileged position – particularly for a woman. When we recognize our privilege, we start changing how we speak about them. And when we start changing how we speak about them, we start changing the culture around them.”
Bethan compares privilege to golf handicaps, where people are born with features whether it’s their sex, skin color, or abilities that put them at an advantage from the start. The opposite is also true, of course. Either way, there isn’t a weighted saddlebag option in ultrarunning.
Changing the culture within the existing system
If you hadn’t figured it out from the main demographic of ultrarunners, the same applies to race directors. That’s where that unconscious bias comes in again, but this time they’re just not thinking about periods or breastfeeding because they’ve never had to think about it for themselves or for most of the participants. That post-industrial Masculine Christianity mindset courses unwittingly through their veins.
There’s a tacit understanding here that the system is not going to be overhauled overnight. The simplest solution would be to have diversity among the race directors, but that’s just not a real option, so what can the existing system of race directors do to improve the culture of ultrarunning?
Part of what Bethan does as the Feminist Sports Sociologist involves is working with race directors to create more parity in ultrarunning. Here are her biggest things to look out for.
Language: Talk about races appropriately. Overly aggressive language (TOUGH! GRIT!) is not really necessary.
Visual representation: Ask yourself if the photos you’re using will make women comfortable at the event. Maybe not all “super-fit-looking white men.”
Physical representation: Actually have women on the start line.
Facilities: Do women have places they can change privately if they want to. What provisions are there for women who prefer to cover themselves? What about breastfeeding and periods?
We haven’t even touched on the safety issues. In-race tracking is poor, and there aren’t thorough criminal records checks for volunteers. Those two things alone are enough to reframe running in a remote area for 10+ hours as the plot for a horror movie.
Ultrarunning is a new and rapidly-growing sport. It’s the Wild West, where those currently in power are more likely to be the first, rather than the best. So, if you think no, why? Why do you not want more safety and regulation? Is your small portion of power at risk? What is your power worth without the whole community feeling satisfied?
None of these solutions are perfect because there isn’t one kind of feminism that everyone can agree with and settle on. We saw that recently when SheRaces, attempting to step up and organize a series of women-only trail races in the UK, made the choice of excluding trans athletes. That error was eventually fixed (after numerous comments and open letters of varying levels of disgust), but the point stands. Feminist philosophy is wide-ranging, and is only all-encompassing because of all the different people offering their ideas.
However, if we understand that running is a microcosm of society, we can also understand that the communities and organizations doing this kind of work within running are the grassroots of society, fixing the weeds one by one to make ultrarunning a more pleasant and inclusive experience.
For Bethan, it comes back to redressing privilege: “There's a responsibility on those who are privileged in society to learn about those challenges because we've got people at the grassroots working their butts off to make change.”
A lot of the work simply acts to give women a space to participate. Women want to participate. They want to spend their money running these incredible distances. Additionally, the work has a real ripple effect in society as people who witness positive behavior at races, within their leisure time will adopt that in their non-running lives. If they see more inclusivity on the start line, imagine what that might do in their workplace. Imagine the different decisions that might be made.
Ultimately, if you’re not paying attention to the women in your sport, you need to ask yourself why you’re choosing to miss out, and why the status quo is good enough for you.
The Feminist Sports Sociologist [IG]
Housekeeping
SUPPORT - Upgrade your subscription for just $1 a week to support my journalism. Tell your runner friends about this newsletter for a free month of upgraded access..
WIN - You can win a $100 Janji gift card every single week of 2025 if you upgrade your membership. And you can win 12 times. Do the maths.
MERCH - Buy the last of the Running Sucks x Fractel hats, a special Glendale t-shirt, or a sticker pack and I’ll donate 100% of profits to Pasadena Humane, who have taken in hundreds of animals displaced by the fires.
Thanks for reading
- Raz
Raz, some thoughts. Great topic. For context, I am a white middle aged middle class male, who is also an ultrarunner. My best running friend and training partner is a younger, Hispanic female. So, I get it. I volunteer every year at a race with a woman in leadership, one of my favorite races has a woman race director. I am all on board.
I am going to remark specifically on the gender question here.
Is this just a microcosm of greater society? One could argue your title might as well be "the power dynamics of politics", where even when women make it into power, they have to mimic the standard template of behavior. Masculine. Where I work, I had a woman boss. I cried once at work due to a panic attack. She got angry with me and told me to "Not show emotions at work!" If you see the irony of that..... she got ANGRY which of course is a perfectly acceptable emotion within a masculine dominated mind set.
A very common interpretation of "feminism" is "allowing" women to take on masculine roles, in other words: all genders having equal rights and opportunities, as long as they are the "acceptable" ones.
To me, this is the start of the issue. The expectation that we are "equal" pushes us to a single template mindset, the masculine type. You want to be equal? Then have "Grit" and determination, "overcome" those obstacles, be aggressive, "crush" that race. Why do women not come out and race? Maybe they don't want to feel like they have to be that way. Maybe the template of warrior doesn't fit.
If I could, I would turn this whole thing around. Why do we not value feminine qualities, regardless of which gender you happen to be? Why not "embrace" the effort, nurture the pain, welcome fatigue? Nope we battle, we fight. We don't cry, we get angry.
I answered your poll. I said No. This is a larger issue that reaches beyond Ultrarunning.
This is the nature of sport, masculine qualities. Is there room for feminine qualities? Absolutely. Instead of talking about gender, why are we not talking about gender qualities, regardless of which gender you identity with?
Male. Female. (gender)
Man. Woman. (Sex)
Masculine. Feminine. (qualities).
Until everyone understands, and values, ALL of these, and understands they can cross over, and even BLEND on a continuum, and depending on the situation, we are stuck with a mostly Male/Masculine world.
Lastly. The US recently had an opportunity to push change at the highest level. Why, in November, did so many women and people of every color vote against their own best interests? That was rhetorical. I wish I knew the answer to that one.
Recognizing privilege hit home for me.
I present as a white male but I am Puerto Rican. For years, I 'hid' that because of the conversations that were being had around me.
Today, I am taking my opportunity to move forward and bring people along because of how I look.
This also means that I recognize my privilege more today than I ever have and do not take it for granted because I know others are not given the same opportunities that I am.....based simply on how I look.