Eiger Ultra Trail Gender Split

Alright, we’re keeping a theme here. The Eiger Ultra Trail (by UTMB) is happening July 13-17th in the Swiss Alps. To not constantly focus on Hardrock 100, which gets overblown media attention anyways, I thought I’d look at another big race and compare the gender/sex split for the runners entered.

The Eiger Ultra Trail has four main races during their 5 day event. (I did not count the couples race, or their new E250 team race in this calculation).

There are a total of 3,544 runners on the starting list, 1,135 are women or 32% of the total.

This breaks down as follow for the various races:

• E101 – 833 total runners, 113 women (14%)
• E51 – 1030 total runners, 277 women (27%)
• E35 – 718 total runners, 259 women (26%)
• E16 – 963 total runners, 486 women (51!)

I have a theory on why the big distances have such low participation by women: It’s called patriarchy in the family home.