see jane get faster and faster… or not

The Times has an interesting story by Gina Kolata about women supposedly getting faster as they get older:

Men, as might be expected, get slower as they age. At a recent five-kilometer race in Pine Beach, N.J., which drew nearly 1,000 runners, the fastest man was 24 years old and the men’s times increased with each five-year age group.

But the women were different — their times were all over the place with older women beating younger women in almost every age category. The fastest woman was 37 years old; the fastest woman in the 45 to 49 age group beat the fastest woman in the 20 to 24 and the 40 to 44 age groups.

The same thing happened in another five-kilometer local race, the Eden Family Run, in Princeton, N.J.

There, the top female runner in the 50 to 54 age group beat the top females in the 20 to 24, 25 to 29, and 40 to 44 age groups.

And it’s not just a New Jersey effect. Others have noticed it elsewhere and when I did a random check of race results in California, I saw it there too. On Aug. 8, in a 10-kilometer race in Alameda, the 53-year-old woman who won in the 50 to 54 age group was faster than the woman who won in the 25 to 29 group. A 38-year-old woman beat every other woman in the race.

Kolata talks about advertising messages and how women line up at races to explain this supposed phenomenon. Both of which seem pretty unconvincing to me: I mean, how well you do in a race has very little to do with whether you “warm up and do strides” (which I never do), it has to do with how much training and hard effort you’re willing to put in beforehand. And honestly, when I first started getting really serious about my running, it wasn’t due to anyone’s encouragement, or anyone telling me what to do because I’m a guy. It was something I did on my own.

I have an alternative explanation for Ms. Kolata. The reason why older women are winning the women’s division of races in Pine Crest, N.J., Princeton, N.J. and Alameda, Calif. is simply that young, ambitious women in their 20s and early 30s generally wouldn’t be living and racing in those towns. They would be living in Noo Yawk Effing City and Los Angeles. It’s only later when they settle down and move to the burbs would they be competing there.

I checked the NYRR website for evidence on this theory.

• Club Champs 5-miler: The top seven female finishers are all 30 years old or younger. Of the top 50 women, only five were over 40. The first woman in her 50s came in 121st among the women.
• Brooklyn Half Marathon: The top five and nine of the top 11 runners are in their 20s. Just three of the top 50 runners are over 40.
• Run For Central Park 4-miler: There were a few more women in their 40s represented here. Running Times Editor Gordon Bakoulis, 46, came in third. Women over 40 were six of the top 20 runners. .. but still only 16 of the top 116. The top women over 50 was the 79th female.

P.S. – It’s also possible that a lot of those good New Jersey women in their 40s and 50s are stay-at-home mothers whose children are teenagers, so they have more free time to devote to their training.