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 document. The earlier excessive of 19 feminine finishers was set in 2022, which eclipsed the entire 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 specifically, and the working neighborhood typically, 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 implies 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’s actually extra work to be finished to assist make the occasion accessible to extra ladies and every kind of oldsters, that is additionally fascinating and worthy of dialog and celebration.

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

Maybe most notably, this 12 months’s race noticed a outstanding 93% finisher fee within the ladies’s subject. The lads’s subject, against this, had a 72% finisher fee, 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 remark that girls, typically, are much less doubtless than males to enroll in occasions that they don’t suppose 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 figuring out that they could be unsuitably educated.

One other argument, alongside comparable strains, means that males could also be extra prepared to simply accept failure than ladies and, conversely, that girls attempt to keep away from failure because it tends to come back with a destructive social stigma that’s particular to ladies. Males, this line of argument goes on to say, are prepared to threat 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 aim of the adjustments Hardrock has made over time, it’s fascinating to watch the outcomes of those adjustments and what they could inform us about these of us who’ve discovered our manner into this excellent sport.

No matter your opinion is of why the ladies’s finisher fee was a lot greater 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 doable, we could have a rare laboratory by which to review what it takes to get this huge factor finished.

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 document for ladies aged 60 to 69. Picture: 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 very 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 checklist?
• 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. Picture: iRunFar/Eszter Horanyi