The Girls of the Hardrock 100 – iRunFar

When Gina Harcrow of Monument, Colorado, completed the 2023 Hardrock 100, she turned the twenty seventh feminine finisher of this yr’s race — a brand new document. The earlier excessive of 19 feminine finishers was set in 2022, which eclipsed the full of 18 set again in 2017. Previous to that, the variety of feminine finishers fluctuated between 5 and 14 for greater than a decade.

In recent times, the Hardrock organizers particularly, and the working neighborhood generally, have labored to extend feminine participation in Hardrock. The choice a couple of years in the past to conduct distinct lotteries for every gender and to base the variety of feminine starters on the variety of females within the lottery signifies that the variety of feminine starters continues to creep up.

This previous yr’s 29 feminine starters was essentially the most in race historical past, two greater than the 27 that began in 2022. Whereas there may be definitely extra work to be completed to assist make the occasion accessible to extra girls and every kind of parents, that is additionally fascinating and worthy of dialog and celebration.

Maybe most notably, this yr’s race noticed a outstanding 93% finisher charge within the girls’s subject. The boys’s subject, in contrast, had a 72% finisher charge, fairly a distinction!

For years there was dialogue about why extra girls don’t qualify for and run Hardrock. A number of years in the past, after an extended dialogue in regards to the prior occasion lottery system that biased previous performances that are dominated by males, a couple of arguments emerged. One argument that has been made is the remark that ladies, generally, are much less probably than males to enroll in occasions that they don’t suppose they’ve an affordable likelihood of ending. Males, the reasoning continues, are more likely to throw warning to the wind and “ship it,” even in an occasion as notoriously troublesome as Hardrock, and even figuring out that they might be unsuitably educated.

One other argument, alongside comparable traces, means that males could also be extra keen to simply accept failure than girls and, conversely, that ladies attempt to keep away from failure because it tends to return with a detrimental social stigma that’s particular to girls. Males, this line of argument goes on to say, are keen to danger failure for glory whereas girls care far much less about exterior glory and extra about intrinsic satisfaction. Whereas these distinctions have been definitely not the purpose of the modifications Hardrock has made through the years, it’s fascinating to look at the outcomes of those modifications and what they might inform us about these of us who’ve discovered our means into this glorious sport.

No matter your opinion is of why the ladies’s finisher charge was a lot greater than the lads’s at this yr’s Hardrock, one factor is evident — the ladies are right here to remain, and so long as the system continues to permit for the problem to be unfold throughout as many individuals as attainable, we could have a unprecedented laboratory during which to check what it takes to get this large factor completed.

Bottoms up!

AJW’s Beer of the Week

This week’s beer of the week comes from the Ska Brewing Firm in Durango, Colorado. Pink Vapor Stew is a really distinctive beer marketed as a bitter ale with root veggies. Brewed with conventional bitter hops mixed with beets, carrots, ginger, and apples — this can be a beer that must be tasted to be believed.

Name for Feedback

• Did you enter the lottery for this yr’s Hardrock 100? Is it in your bucket record?
• Are you able to see extra girls getting concerned in ultrarunning at your native races too?