Even Pacing Wins: Why Women's Steady Effort Is a Race-Day Advantage
Race Day Strategy
Even Pacing Wins: Why Women's Steady Effort Is a Race-Day Advantage
The instinct to go out hard on the biggest day is exactly what tends to cost the most.
On the morning of your biggest training weekend, or your biggest race day, fresh legs lie to you. The first climb feels easier than it should, the pace feels sustainable, and it is tempting to bank that early feeling as speed. What large-dataset research on ultra-distance pacing shows, again and again, is that the athletes who go out at that comfortable-feeling pace are usually the ones who pay for it hardest later. And it turns out that women, as a group, are structurally better at resisting that temptation than men.
Markovic and colleagues (2025) examined 3,837 Western States 100 finisher splits across nearly two decades and found a clear and repeated pattern: men start faster and slow down more, while women maintain a more consistent effort relative to their own average race speed across the distance. Suter and colleagues (2020) found the same shape of result at UTMB, with women showing less pacing deterioration across the race than men. Neither of these studies found a meaningful age effect on this consistency in women, which suggests even pacing is not simply something experienced athletes learn over years. It looks more like a stable tendency in how women distribute effort under fatigue, one that is available to lean on from early in a build, not just after a decade of racing.
This matters directly for a weekend where the two biggest days of a build sit back to back. Bearden and van Woerden (2025) found that athletes who maintained even pacing across ultra distances outperformed those who went out hard, and that this advantage was more pronounced in female finishers than male ones. The practical read is not that day one should be run cautiously out of fear. It is that day one should be run at the effort that lets day two still function as training rather than survival. Treat the two days as one combined effort, not two separate long efforts stacked on top of each other, and pace the first accordingly.
When you hit a rough patch, the most useful question is rarely why am I suffering. It is: did I start too fast?
This retrospective question is worth building into training now, precisely because a genuinely hard weekend gives you a real, low-stakes place to practise asking it. O'Loughlin and colleagues (2019) found that for women, consistent training volume and shorter-distance speed predict ultra performance more strongly than any single big long run. Read alongside the pacing data, the pattern is consistent: durability and discipline built steadily across many sessions outperform a single heroic effort, on the big weekend and on race day itself.
The practical takeaway for your next big back-to-back weekend, or any multi-day event: run the opening climb at an effort that feels almost too easy. Hold something back at the top rather than emptying the tank on day one. If day two starts to unravel, ask honestly whether day one set it up, and use the answer to pace the next big weekend better. Even pacing is not a conservative fallback. For women specifically, the research says it is closer to a genuine performance strategy.
Sources: Markovic et al. (2025), PMID 40087377. Suter et al. (2020), PMID 32992625. Bearden and van Woerden (2025), PMID 40354403. O'Loughlin et al. (2019), PMID 31137635.
