May 31, 2025 12:00:41 UTC
Tara Dower in September 2024, when she became the fastest person to complete the Appalachian Trail.
By Starre Vartan
In September, Tara Dower became the fastest person ever to complete the Appalachian Trail. Her record — 40 days, 18 hours and 6 minutes — was 13 hours faster than the previous record holder, a man. That same year, 18-year-old Audrey Jimenez made history in Arizona as the first girl to win a Division 1 high school state wrestling title — competing against boys.
Across a variety of sports, women are not just catching up after generations of exclusion from athletics — they’re setting the pace. In ultramarathons, women regularly outperform men, especially as distances stretch toward the extreme. Jasmin Paris in 2024 became one of only 20 people ever to finish the brutal 100-mile Barkley Marathons race in under 60 hours — while pumping breast milk.
Jasmin Paris after finishing the Barkley Marathons race in 2024.
In long-distance swimming, female athletes now so routinely excel that within the community, their records are just part of the sport. In climbing last year, Barbara “Babsi” Zangerl became the first person, man or woman, ever to “flash” — climb without prior practice and sans falls — the towering Yosemite rock formation El Capitan in under three days.
These aren’t just athletic feats. They’re cultural resets. Experts say we’re finally waking up to what women’s bodies are capable of.
And it’s not just young women blazing new physical trails.
“In the Masters 70-plus, they just set a record for the women’s deadlift,” says exercise physiologist Stacy Sims, who teaches at Stanford University and the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. “Older women are demonstrating that ‘I am strong and I can do this.’”
Tara Dower set a record for completing the Appalachian Trail, finishing 13 hours faster than the previous record-holder, a man.
Built to endure
Generally, discussions of “strength” have meant brute force and speed over short distances — qualities historically associated with male physiology. But stamina, recovery, resilience and adaptability are as essential to athletic performance. And in those areas, female physiology holds real advantages, experts in sports science, human physiology, and biological anthropology have found.The myth of female fragility is relatively modern. For most of human history, women were hauling gear, tracking prey, and walking eight to 10 miles a day — often while pregnant, menstruating, nursing or carrying children (one estimate found that hunter-gatherer women covered more than 3,000 miles in a child’s first four years of life).
That evolutionary foundation undergirds today’s feats, experts say. “Female bodies have superior fatigue resistance,” says Sophia Nimphius, pro-vice-chancellor of sport at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia.
In test after test, female muscles outlast men’s when doing repetitive, if lower-weight, work, according to the pioneering research of Sandra Hunter, an exercise physiologist at the University of Michigan. Hunter’s research — and others since — has shown that women’s muscles fatigue more slowly than men’s, so they can knock out more reps, more consistently. Men might start strong with heavier lifts, but when the workout gets long? Women can keep going, sometimes twice as long, or longer, outlasting even the most jacked guys.
That endurance capacity is likely due to female bodies preferentially using slow-burning fat over quickly exhausted carbohydrates, in both athletes and less sporty people, studies have shown.
In addition to using fat for staying power, fatigue-resistant slow-twitch muscle fibers are generally more common in women’s bodies (though all bodies vary in their proportion of muscle fibers according to individual genetics). This muscle type is also more efficient than fast-twitch, which are generally higher in men’s muscles. “Our muscles do more with less,” Nimphius says.
Recovery and resilience
Beyond endurance, several small studies on sprinting and heavy weightlifting have shown that women also recover from hard workouts more quickly. Slow-twitch muscles inherently have a higher capacity to recover, but the female advantage may also be explained by faster healing: A study shows two times faster muscle repair rates for female mice (though mice studies don’t always translate to humans). The reason? There’s strong evidence that estrogen reduces inflammation and supports muscle repair (one reason that Sims recommends postmenopausal women get targeted training support and recovery time).However, some studies show that women are more prone to other kinds of sports injuries, especially certain kinds of knee and ACL injuries, but it’s not yet known whether that’s explained by biomechanical differences in bodies, hormones, or poor training. Some researchers say the greater injury rates in women are because existing research is based on men’s bodies: “Female bodies are different — I tell [women] the protocols you’re applying aren’t meant for your body,” says Sims.
Feats of bodily strength — in both ordinary women and trained athletes — are more than just purely physical. Many experts on competitive strength remark on this mental aspect of female endurance: “I do think that there is a mental grit, a resilience factor that helps women go to a place in their mind — a state that allows them to continue to push to the limit,” says Emily Kraus, director of the Female Athlete Science and Translational Research (FASTR) Program at Stanford University.
A changing future
Men have usually defined strength by what their bodies tend to be good at, but max bench presses or fastest sprint times, both of which men tend to excel at, are just a few ways to test the human body. If we instead focused on endurance, resilience, longevity and recovery, the narrative of who is “strong” would probably have a female form, many experts say.Currently, young female athletes still don’t receive the same level of encouragement, training, and scientific attention as boys, Nimphius says. Research into girl’s and women’s health, while slowly improving, still lags — just 6 percent of sports and exercise research has looked exclusively at female bodies, according to a 2021 study.
Considering all the wins for women already, what would the landscape look like if we designed sports science around female physiology — rather than downsizing routines created for men? The current generation of women athletes is challenging the very architecture of athleticism. Soon, experts say, they will have better information to help female athletes understand and train, and that will be true for weekend warriors and 5k racing types as well. Ongoing and anticipated sports science studies will be “a game changer for girls and women — not just now, but in five, ten, fifteen years from now,” Kraus says. “And that’s really exciting.”
