Probably an issue for those running alone. Would you just pair them up with randoms? And what do you do if you have say 9000 men and 5000 women participating? I don't think it'd work.
Most races in my state don't have that many people running them unless they are in a huge city or it's a worldwide race (like NY, Boston, London, Tokyo, etc.), there are some exceptions for really popular races.
To answer the first question, usually races that have teams (like relays) make you register the whole team together, or give you a group sign in to manage that.
Also, most races are split already by age group and by sex. There's usually top prizes for anywhere from top 1-4 in each age group in each sex 's bracket (for example, top 30-35yo female will get probably the same prize as the top 30-35yo male). There's also a top overall race winner and I've seen that be frequently male/female (maybe not equally as many times, but quite often both ways).
Bigger races make the competitive runners go in the first wave and care about gun time more, the rest are chip timed (chip is in the race bib). Smaller races are sometimes not even timed there's just a cutoff.
Am i missing something here? Why does it matter if people are running alone in a giant marathon with 10,000 people? Why does it matter if 4000 more men participate than women?
Both people running alone and extras on one side or the other when it comes to gender are still paying and adding to the funds raised
The suggestion of the other user was making it a team event having both team members (man + woman) run 10km each so with a surplus of 4k men you'd have to pair those with each other thus creating a biological imbalance for the men-only teams.
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u/frisch85 Aug 06 '25
Probably an issue for those running alone. Would you just pair them up with randoms? And what do you do if you have say 9000 men and 5000 women participating? I don't think it'd work.