London Marathon – always one of the best days of the year, either following friends and loved ones in the race or, a couple of times, actually running it myself. Mid-spring, just as the weather turns bearable, making London a little less grey and smoggy. Except this year it’s October, it’s hammering down and I’m watching the elite-only race on TV rather than from the barriers between mile 13 and 14. Thanks Covid.

Earlier this week I was asked a question that seems to circulate among club runners at least once a year: is it easier for women to get a Good for Age time than men?

For anyone unfamiliar with the idea, a Good for Age (GFA) time is a standard that race organisers set out for qualification to enter an event. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people apply for the ballot to enter London Marathon, so your chances of holding a golden ticket to join the 40,000 starters is slim and for many people, raising the required funds to run for a charity is probably a stretch too far.

So the alternative route to the start line is GFA – for each age category, the organiser defines a set time that permits entry to the race. For instance, as a male 18-40-year-old, that time is currently three hours exactly (they change every now and then – a few years ago it was 3.05). It gets a little more complicated if there’s more qualifiers than available spaces, so you might actually need to go a little quicker than the set benchmark.

For female 18-40-year-olds the GFA boundary is three hours, 45 minutes, which at first glance does always look like a big difference, which is perhaps reflected by the fact that I know more women with GFA times than men.

Looking at the nearest example to home, that of my partner Sarah and I, we take part in sport at a roughly similar level: we spend pretty much the same number of hours training and we’ve been completing races for about the same length of time. We both take it fairly seriously – more than most, but not as much as some. My marathon PB (from 2019) is currently 3.03 while hers, which she achieved earlier in 2020, is now 3.18, so if anything she has nudged ahead of me.

That means I’m currently over three minutes outside the target time for my age, while Sarah is 27 minutes inside.

So, on the surface, I would have to say yes, I do think the GFA time for women is easier than men. However, the more important question is whether or not that’s fair – and again, my answer is yes. Here’s why.

Firstly, one of the stated aims of London Marathon’s race organisers for a while has been to achieve and maintain an event with a 50/50 split between male and female competitors. For a start, that’s a very noble ambition, but that target becomes even more important when you think that this a huge public and televisual event, broadcast in the UK on BBC and watched by millions.

It’s long been said that sport isn’t so much about the winner, but the taking part – I think you can extend that and add a layer of inspiring others. In 2012 when the Olympics came to London and it felt ok to be British, the whole spirit was around watching sport, getting involved and encouraging others to join in too.

In this respect, role models aren’t record breakers and medal winners – they’re the invisible, everyday heroes who are getting up at 5am to log their miles and juggling work, family and training commitments. Seeing thousands of other normal people who look, talk and live just like you encourages others to think that they could do that too.

When I look at the difference in times for men and women, it isn’t as straightforward as the numbers in black and white. At that particularly moment in time, it could be argued that 3-dead for men requires more time training, greater commitment and less chocolate than 3.45 for women, but us men have an advantage we don’t always like to talk about.

When the first London Marathon took place in 1981, it was only 14 years after Kathrine Switzer was dragged from the world’s most heralded 26.2 race, the Boston Marathon. The reason for her ejection was simple – women were not permitted to take part. How come? Because, in the eyes of the race organisers and, no doubt, conventional wisdom at the time, women were incapable of completing the distance.

As I watch today’s elite-only race, 2019’s winner Brigid Kosgei is probably harbouring dreams of breaking either her own world record of 2.14.04 (set in a mixed race) or Mary Keitany’s benchmark of 2.17.01 (set in a women’s only race). Not bad considering barely 50 years ago women were viewed as being so much weaker they wouldn’t make the finish.

Meanwhile, marathon running, athletics generally and, more broadly, sport altogether, have been and continue to be male-dominated arenas. When you look at other sports events, it’s always that way – for instance, when I made my failed attempt at Ironman in 2019, there were 250 women in the entire field of 2,500 – there were more than 250 men in my age category alone.

It’s kind of just accepted that men take part in sport, while women stand on the sidelines cheering, usually cradling the children as the prehistoric view goes.

Right from a young age, there are undoubtedly more barriers, both socially and culturally, that prevent women from taking part in sport, committing as fervently as their male counterparts and going on to enjoy incredible achievements.

While men might look at the GFA times and think ‘ok, I might need to train a bit more, recover a bit better or cut back on the chips a bit’, that’s nothing compared to the vast majority of women who have generations of misogyny and patriarchal patronisation to overcome. Factor in the near-certain judgment of friends, colleagues and strangers, often bewildered as to why a woman would want to be out in the cold and rain on a Sunday morning when they could be nursing a hangover or pretending to like their in-laws, and it becomes clear that the challenge for female runners is far greater than just x number of miles within a given period of time.

By positioning the goalposts for entry in a way that facilitates a 50/50 split, London Marathon should be celebrated – I would hazard a guess that running clubs up and down the country now look a lot more equally populated than athletics clubs did a few years ago and it’s the concept of equality that should be focused on here.

Often when people talk of equality, they think of giving everyone exactly the same access to something as everyone else – a completely open ballot system, regardless of age, gender or ability. Except that isn’t really equality – if anything, especially in an environment so skewed traditionally towards one particular group, white men, it only serves to exacerbate the status quo and keep the doors locked to everyone else.

In my mind, equality is less about treating everyone the same and more centred on creating opportunities that provide everyone equal ability and facility to participate. In this particular case, if that means a seemingly ‘easier’ timeframe to allow the same number of male and female runners to be there or thereabouts for qualification, then so be it. Over time, if that encourages more women to take part, the sport will see a raising of the bar and narrowing of the time gap in order to maintain a 50/50 split and that cannot be a bad thing.

So, going back to the original question: Do I think the GFA time for women is easier than men?Yes. But do I think that’s fair? Yes – yes I do.