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Jogger in winter: Women prefer to run half marathons

Photo: Mark Humphrey/AP

Sometimes it happens by chance that you think about strange topics.

Deals with questions that have little relevance to everyday life.

This happened to me recently and it resulted in me thinking about the topic of ambition.

Best times do not arouse emotions

The trigger was a harmless conversation with my favorite man.

We were sitting relaxed in our kitchen on a gray Sunday afternoon.

We had both finished our run and were talking about the last weekend in April.

THE Hamburg running weekend: On Saturday, 12,000 children run a mini marathon, the so-called tenth.

The half marathon and marathon will take place on Sunday.

And we run with it.

So everyone: the children do the tenth, the husband does the marathon and I do the half marathon.

For the second time.

And for the first time with my running friend.

"How long do you want to run?" the man asked.

I answered cheerfully: "I don't know, the main thing is that we can do it." To which he gave me a look that could only be described as pitying.

And then he said: “You must have a certain sporting ambition, right?”

Now you have to know that sporting ambition is very unevenly distributed in our family.

I simply don't have one.

I do sports because I enjoy it, because it relaxes me, because it keeps me fit and happy.

I live out my ambition in other areas of life.

I actually tend to be suspicious of people who show excessive sporting ambition.

I don't understand the need to run faster and further, or to have to check the split times after every run.

Best sporting performances don't arouse any emotions for me.

I would never dream of ultra-running like my colleague Ole Reissmann.

Do women have less sporting ambition?

Nevertheless, this thrown out sentence got me thinking.

And about what ambition actually means.

According to the Duden, ambition is the “strong or exaggerated striving for success and honor,” which somehow doesn’t sound very pleasant.

The definition on Wikipedia sounds a little more conciliatory, according to which ambition is understood as “a person’s striving for personal goals, which is anchored in their character”.

I can go along with that, since it implies that people can consider very different things to be important.

So do women and men differ when it comes to sporting ambition?

Or to put it another way: Do women have less of it?

Anyone who enters the keywords “woman” and “athletic ambition” online will either find platitudes (“Women run differently than men. There is usually less ambition involved, often more sense” or “In contrast to men, they do not overwhelm themselves so easily.” ), articles about eating disorders (!) or land directly on texts about the professional ambition of women (which is said to be just as strong as that of men).

What is interesting in this context, however, is that significantly fewer women run marathons than half marathons: in the 21.1 kilometer distance, a third of all participants are women, while only a fifth struggle over the entire 42.195 kilometers.

Maybe because the marathon is still considered the “little man’s Matterhorn,” as former German marathon champion and running book author Herbert Steffny says.

Which type are you?

Women probably don't need climbing a Matterhorn as much.

Or they remember from school that the marathon is named after the Greek runner Pheidippides.

Who unfortunately collapsed dead upon reaching his destination.

I can definitely say for myself: the Matterhorn can do me.

Running 21 kilometers in a row always satisfies my ambition, no matter how long it takes.

But I'll discuss this again with my running friend tomorrow, maybe she has more ambitions than I previously realized.

And you, dear readers?

Are you more of a “Matterhorn” type or “The main thing is to have fun” type?

Write to me (susanne.amann@spiegel.de) and tell me what drives you.

I'm looking forward to it and wish you a nice weekend.

And with that, see you soon!

Yours, Susanne Amann