Parent didn't say women were better at mental effort. They said it's as much mental as physical effort. Men's physical strength advantage decreases in significance as the distances increase.
They said "There’s a reason the longer the ultra, the faster women are compared to men", immediately after saying it is as much mental as physical effort.
It's pretty clear from observing almost every sport, including running distances shorter than 50 miles, that men dominate women physically. If men and women are similar at mental effort, and men are better physically at performing, then why would women start to take over on long distances but not shorter distances?
So, either women are better at mental effort than men, or something about biology lets women perform better than men at the ultra long distance stuff but not the shorter stuff. I say it is just biology. If OP thought it had no relation to mental effort skills difference between men and women, then why even bring it up?
You’re not thinking statistically. At shorter distances the tier 2 men dominate the women who happen to be mentally stronger but physically weaker
At longer distances the mental advantage for the top women start to matter more than their physical disadvantage when compared with the men who happen to be physically tougher but mentally weaker than them
Ok, but that is just asserting that mental toughness is what matters here. And it ignores the fact that there are far more men in the slightly less than ultra marathon world than women, so shouldn't there also be more men with a chance to win if mental toughness is equally distributed?
Maybe it's the fact that women have a higher percentage of type 1 muscle fibers than men, and it just takes until ultra marathon level distances that the increased proportion of type 1 fibers makes up for the relative higher percentage of type 2 fibers in men. Or maybe women are more efficient at burning fat than men are.
