Emily has a pretty funny post about mixed-gender running and talks about guys who lie about planning on an easy run only to come out and try to race their female running partners.
Most of the time I’ve spent training has been with women, so I guess I have something to say on this. I’ve trained with all sorts of girls. A couple have been a little slower than me, but they were very experienced runners. I learned a lot from them when I let them control the pace. The Missus is much slower than me, but all I have to do is grab the parachute double stroller and count her miles as a warmup, and I’m happy to run her pace.
A couple of my female running partners have been much faster than me. I remember doing some 1m intervals as part of a longish run with one girl who absolutely took me to the brink on every rep until the last one; that’s when she really opened it up and buried me.
So yeah, I’ve been chicked more times than I can count. And I don’t care. In a training run, it just helps make you faster. In a race, well…there are so many girls who finish so far ahead of me that the one or two who sneak by me at the end are negligible in number.
Most of the girls I’ve run with have had a comparable pace to mine. This can bring out the best and worst of everyone. The upside is that you are in a good position to push each other. The downside is that once the pushing has started, I’ve noticed girls are much more likely than guys are to get mad when you beat them…as if they weren’t participating in the pushing all along.
Of course, their fury (“no…nothing’s wrong…what makes you say that?”) is ultimately expressed in terms like “you drug me into that pace”, not because they got beat.
Bull butter. It’s obvious when you are running with other people exactly who is participating in pushing the pace and who, if anyone, is trying to slow it down. You want to claim after the race that you didn’t want to race? Please.
Personally, I don’t think it has anything to do with the fact that they got beat by a guy, at least from my experience. I have a different theory about what’s really going on:
If there’s one thing worse than getting “chicked” , it’s getting “fat-guyed”.
I love fat-guying people.