This article is a masterpiece in cherry-picking. It's amazing how stupid this kind of pieces can get.

First example: Jasmine Paris in the Barkleys. She was 5th in 2024. The first 4 were all men. No mention of that in the article, even though it directly contradicts the premise of the article. It's insulting for an athlete of the calibre of Paris, who doesn't need this kind of drivel to be recognised as an extraordinary runner in her own right.

Second example: Spine race. Two women topped in 2025 but in 2026 it was five men again at the top.

The next examples are picked out of a forest of results where men massively dominate the field. See this year's UTMB. First woman is 26th.

I have no idea what the article is actually trying to demonstrate. Yes there are amazing female runners, but we have enough statistics with all the races run yearly to show that women usually don't beat men in endurance running.

Betteridge’s law still going strong

Clickbait title aside, this type of comparison is pretty interesting to me. In the same way that different age groups can also be better suited to certain types of physical competition.

Trans women forced to compete with the wrong sex (men) should go into long-distance running just to rub it in the faces of bigots. The potential advantages women have, from the article:

Fat metabolism – women have higher fat stores and burn it more efficiently, giving them a steady energy source for longer.

Muscles – women have more oxygen-efficient muscle fibres, known as "slow twitch", that are better suited for endurance activities.

Fatigue resistance – women retain more strength over hours of endurance exercise.

About the only sexually dimorphic feature relevant at all to sports that trans women retain from their natal biology are skeletal features, everything else changes from hormone replacement therapy. In most cases, your sex really is defined by your hormones. Trans sports bans force biological women to compete with biological men. I think we should use the few sports cases where women outperform men to make a mockery of people who claim trans women belong in men's sports.

So I think trans women forced to compete with the wrong sex should use it to their advantage. Trans female athletes should crowd into long-distance running. Make it so men are completely uncompetitive in the field. Make it so no man can ever win in long-distance running, because they're forced to compete unfairly against trans women. Make it so every "men's" category of long-distance running are completely dominated by trans women runners. And the same for any other sport where women tend to perform better than men.

Trans men unfortunately can't pull the same trick. Trans men are really shut out of sports entirely. They're barred by bigotry from competing with cis males, and they're shut out of women's sports because their regular cis-male level of hormones are slandered as "doping" when forced to compete against cis women. When you see a headline about a trans man competing in women's sports, that's a trans guy who hasn't undergone any medical transition. But trans men who medically transition literally cannot compete in any sports league with a trans sports ban.

But at least trans women can rub it in the faces of bigots. We should make it so that men are completely shut out of the upper ranks of long-distance running.