Women aren't better at ultra marathons they are just more competitive as the distance increases.
Speed is mostly a matter of muscle mass and maintaining speed over time and distance is related to lung capacity and ability to manage lactate build up and men usually have more muscle mass, which means they can maintain more speed.
Women usually weigh less, have less muscle and have more bodyfat so they are ultimately more efficient in overall energy use which starts to become more important as the distance and time increases and the outright speed becomes less important.
Ultramarathons are not really like an marathon where everyone is running at their maximum sustainable speed, there are usually rest stops so women being efficient need less time to refuel on calories compared to men can keep or get going quicker. It's like having a more fuel efficient car that doesn't need to stop for fuel as long or as often compared to a faster car that needs to stop more and for longer at refueling stops.
I doubt there was much evolutionary selection for the ability to run more than 50 miles at once (my understanding is that the female advantage in ultra endurance has to do with muscle/fat composition and lower total skeletal mass, which is a major tradeoff to make for other areas).
The evolutionary adaption to running ultra-distances is persistence hunting, and it was one of the keys to human survival and evolution.
In persistence hunting, over great distances, humans can outrun game animals as long as they pick one animal and track it. Deer, antelope, etc. all run faster in short bursts, but overheat and reach exhaustion after long distances whereas humans can just keep going. Eventually, the human can just walk up to it and make the kill with a knife or rock.
Persistence hunting likely wasn't a major driver of those evolutionary changes.
The hypothesis is really only supported by the fact that we have adaptations that make it theoretically possible, but the times and places those adaptations came about doesn't really match up with the times and places it would have been effective (i.e. woodland where the ground would be too hard for effective tracking [0]).
There are some other things that point away from it, too; it's worth doing some googling.
It's certainly possible that persistence hunting happened to some degree, and it's a fun idea so it really caught on in popular consciousness, but the actual evidence is limited.
Persistence hunting isn't just running 25km to catch 1 deer.
It may also involve multiple scout runs (perhaps 50km or longer) to find where the deer are after the current local deer supply is exhausted. It may also involve moving the entire tribe unit to a location 100-200km away from the current one, which would involve people less fit than tribe hunters.
> It's certainly possible that persistence hunting happened to some degree, and it's a fun idea so it really caught on in popular consciousness, but the actual evidence is limited.
Well, the problem is that evidence for just about everything related to our existence from before the glacial period ended is very limited due to a population bottleneck.
But there's no reason to assume that our ancestors did not use every tool available at their disposal to survive, one of the tools being persistence hunting, which we are still very good at, despite there not being evolutionary pressure to be selected for for the last 7-8 thousand years.
So an ultramarathoner could hunt three back to back instead of one, or maybe two without being an elite athlete with modern hydrocarbon gels. Or get through part of a failed hunt midway and pursue another, etc.
A quick google shows several ultramarathon course records held by women, like Rachel Entrekin on the Cocodona 250, Sophie Woods on the Via Alpina, et cetera.
Sophie Woods moved herself 2000km in 28 days and the scope of that battle is something I’m having trouble with. That’s 70 km/day for a month. There are no land animals I know of that can hit that.
I'm still curious on how much this is an artefact of less participants that run >150km marathons. The link in the other comment compiles data over lots of runners from lots of marathons, but I still haven't found data about how much actually runs the >150km marathons.
It isn't the best written piece, but your snippet feels taken grossly out of context. The rest of it:
"A common response is to invent new work, ask for status reports, and add bureaucracy.
A better response is to go back to working on technical problems. This keeps the manager’s skills fresh and gets them more respect from their reports. The manager should turn into a high-powered spare worker, rather than a papersshuffler."
While being an IC and a manager is quite challenging, I think it's worth discussing the various permutations of it (only one of which is what the author has written about). It can lead to all sorts of systems (round robin leadership within a team being probably one of the most experimental). But for a more conservative, traditional system, there are many examples, e.g. Apple leadership coming out of former ICs.
First, let me make one thing clear: my comment was in no way meant to be a substitute for reading the post. I was not writing some kind of a review for people to decide whether they should read the post, or presenting a summary. I was commenting on what I disliked about it and everyone should read the post to form their own opinions.
That said, I disagree with you about the context. Yes, what you quoted is the immediate context, but I think the bigger context -- the one I described in the rest of my comment -- is the more important one.
Managers are welcome to try to integrate IC activities into their job. In fact, I wish more of them did it, so I didn't have to deal with managers who equate coding to "typing" and can't wait for the AI to replace those of us who have spent years honing that particular skill.
But the IC work should not come at the cost of doing what the manager is supposed to do in the first place: provide a higher level of integration and problem solving for their ICs. By "higher", I mean in the hierarchical sense. A manager is higher on the ladder than I am, and that means they should be able to see a wider perspective and help me integrate it into my work. And their manager should do that for them, so that they can pass it on to me, etc.
The author doesn't want to be a "paper-shuffler"? Guess what, that's one of the most important aspects of their job and, incidentally, one of the reasons why I didn't pick management as my career.
I can relate to the feeling of frustration one occasionally gets when a core aspect of one's job becomes unpleasant, but that's no excuse for straw man arguments.
Not only was William a loyalist, he was the last colonial governor of New Jersey and was one of the chief leaders of the loyalists. His early years and heritage are just crazy stuff, even for our times.
There is a good reason you've not heard about ol William before, because his story and relationships are totally nuts. My lord, the conflicts of interest are at actual war.
Imagine if Putin's bastard son was one of Zelensky's most important generals.
I didn't get the impression this was totally replacing static routes. Seemed to be augmenting it. But also, while your concerns are valid, I don't think they are large enough to not try these things.
Fairly misleading wording with such lines like "Most of the funding for all of the major browsers is going away"... it makes it sound like it goes directly towards the individual browser budgets. That might be true of Mozilla since they don't make that many products tbh, but with Apple and Microsoft, there's no evidence Google's payments don't just go straight into a general fund.
