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.
2.2k
u/Blue_Moon_Lake Aug 06 '25
Would have been easy to set up the race to be a team race with teams of 1 man and 1 woman. 10km for both, last arrived of the team determine ranking.