New Delhi: Male runners are about twice as likely as female runners to hit the wall during a marathon, a new study has found. ‘Hitting the wall’ is a sudden drop in mental and physical energy that runners experience due to a depletion of the body’s stored carbohydrates.
Conducted by researchers from São José dos Campos in Brazil and the University of Zurich in Switzerland, the study found that male runners exhibit significantly less stable pacing strategies than female runners. It was published in Nature on 2 July.
Marathons don’t test how fast a runner can cover a distance, but how efficiently they can manage it. This makes pacing strategy a key part of the sport. The recent study found that male runners, regardless of performance level, are more prone to aggressive pacing and catastrophic deceleration.
“Male runners have consistently outperformed female runners in absolute finish times, a disparity largely attributed to well-documented physiological advantages such as greater muscle mass, lower body fat percentages, greater cardiac mass, higher blood volume, and higher hemoglobin concentrations. However, absolute speed does not equate to pacing efficiency,” the study read.
The researchers analysed 8.7 lakh finishers at the Berlin Marathon between 1999 and 2025. They used a dataset from a World Marathon Major known for its flat profile and consistent conditions in order to isolate biological sex as a variable and minimise topographic confounders.
It’s about behaviour, not just physiology
The disparity didn’t thin as the researchers looked at more experienced players. In fact, it intensified.
“In the Competitive category, male runners were 6.06 times more likely to experience catastrophic deceleration than their female counterparts. This contradicts the notion that pacing errors are solely a function of inexperience,” the study said.
Effectively, high-performance male runners may be more prone to adopting high-risk strategies. This behaviour is potentially shaped by competitive pressures and the complex dynamics of decision-making under physical stress.
“Although sex-specific physiological characteristics modulate the development of fatigue during prolonged endurance exercise, behavioral and strategic factors related to pacing decisions may contribute substantially to sex differences in marathon pacing,” the researchers wrote.
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