When Gina Harcrow of Monument, Colorado, completed the 2023 Hardrock 100, she turned the twenty seventh feminine finisher of this 12 months’s race — a brand new file. 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 on the whole, have labored to extend feminine participation in Hardrock. The choice a number 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 12 months’s 29 feminine starters was probably the most in race historical past, two greater than the 27 that began in 2022. Whereas there may be actually extra work to be executed to assist make the occasion accessible to extra ladies and all types of parents, that is additionally fascinating and worthy of dialog and celebration.

Gina Harcrow kisses the rock, on the finish of her 2023 Hardrock 100 journey. Photograph courtesy of Gina Harcrow.

Maybe most notably, this 12 months’s race noticed a exceptional 93% finisher price within the ladies’s discipline. The boys’s discipline, against this, had a 72% finisher price, fairly a distinction!

For years there was dialogue about why extra ladies don’t qualify for and run Hardrock. A number of years in the past, after a protracted dialogue concerning the prior occasion lottery system that biased previous performances that are dominated by males, a number of arguments emerged. One argument that has been made is the commentary that ladies, on the whole, are much less probably than males to join occasions that they don’t assume they’ve an inexpensive 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 tough as Hardrock, and even understanding that they might be unsuitably skilled.

One other argument, alongside related strains, means that males could also be extra prepared to simply accept failure than ladies and, conversely, that ladies attempt to keep away from failure because it tends to come back with a unfavorable social stigma that’s particular to ladies. Males, this line of argument goes on to say, are prepared to danger failure for glory whereas ladies care far much less about exterior glory and extra about intrinsic satisfaction. Whereas these distinctions had been actually not the objective of the adjustments Hardrock has made through the years, it’s fascinating to watch the outcomes of those adjustments and what they might inform us about these of us who’ve discovered our approach into this glorious sport.

No matter your opinion is of why the ladies’s finisher price was a lot larger than the boys’s at this 12 months’s Hardrock, one factor is obvious — 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 rare laboratory through which to check what it takes to get this massive factor executed.

Bottoms up!

Becky Bates (proper) comes into the Telluride support station at mile 74.5 in competition for a top-10 end. She would go on to set a brand new age-group file for ladies aged 60 to 69. Photograph: iRunFar/Eszter Horanyi

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 — it is a beer that must be tasted to be believed.

Name for Feedback

• Did you enter the lottery for this 12 months’s Hardrock 100? Is it in your bucket listing?
• Are you able to see extra ladies getting concerned in ultrarunning at your native races too?

Claire Bannwarth (left) and Annie Hughes share early miles within the 2023 Hardrock 100. Photograph: iRunFar/Eszter Horanyi