"She's a machine!"

Why do people insist on calling Jasmin Paris "a machine"? What is really being said?

[A version of this text was given as a talk at King’s College, London, on 18 April 2024. When the recording is available, I will post a link].

When, in March this year, Jasmin Paris became the first female runner to complete the Barkley Marathons in its nearly-40-year history, sports coverage and social media resounded with one phrase in particular: “She’s a machine!”

The Barkley Marathons’ terrain is notoriously forbidding: 100+ miles across gradients so steep and briars and woods so dense that when, back in 1977, inmate James Earl Ray escaped from the Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary - through which the race route passes - he managed to travel only 12 miles in 2 1/4 days. One of the race’s creators, Guy “Lazarus Lake” Cantrell, has been recorded as saying that “the race is too hard for women. They are simply not tough enough” to complete the distance within the 60-hour cut-off.

But in March, British fell- and ultra-runner Jasmin Paris proved Cantrell wrong and became the first wom…