So What?
From our results, we can see that females and males tend to excercise in roughly equal proportions (54±8% vs 46±8%) as there is no significant difference. These results are comparable to running race results from 2011 for races under 10 km. Warrior Dash, a 5 mile obstacle race had 51.5% female participants (Warrior Dash, 2011) and Harry’s Spring Run Off a 10 km race had 48.5% female participants (sportstats, 2011). However, when we compared our results to longer endurance races such as Tour de White Rock (2011), BC Bike Race (2011), and BMO Vancouver Marathon (2011) which had 23.8%, 29.1% and 43.3% female participcation respectively, men tend to participate at a higher percentage.
The Vancouver Sun Run, being the second largest 10k timed foot race in the world, showed that there were over 50,000 participants in 2011 in all events (Vancouver Sun, 2011). Specifically for the 2011 10k race, there were 21,669 (56%) female participants, and 17,206 (44%) male participants (Vancouver Sun, 2011).
These differences in endurance races compared to shorter races and our results could be explained by the convenience sampling we did at the Sea Wall. Further studies are needed to be done to determine which gender is more active.
Links to Other studies:
Physical Activity Levels of Canadian Adults: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-625-x/2011001/article/11552-eng.pdf
Overweight and Obese adults: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-625-x/2011001/article/11464-eng.htm
Heart Health and Cholesterol Levels of Canadians: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-625-x/2010001/article/11136-eng.pdf
Obesity in Canada: http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ubc/docDetail.action?docID=10478859
Obesity Epidemic in Canada: http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ubc/docDetail.action?docID=10168150
References:
Warrior Dash (2011), Retreived from: http://warriordash.com/results/2011_BritishColumbia_Sat_AG.htm
Sports Stats (2011), Retreived from: http://www.sportstats.ca/displayResults.xhtml?racecode=101775 on April 3, 2012
Tour de White Rock (2011), Retreived from: http://www.tourdewhiterock.ca/2011-Results.tsp on April 3, 2012
BC Biker Race (2011), Retreived from: http://docs.bcbikerace.com/2011RaceWeek/BCBR2011_Epic_Results_Day7.pdf on April 3, 2012
BMO Vancouver marathon (2011), Retreived from: http://www.bmovanmarathon.ca/results/race_results/main68/bmo_race.php?name=&bib=&gender=&race=50&division=&units=km on April 3, 2012
Vancouver Sun. (2011). Retrived from: http://www.vancouversun.com/2011+Vancouver+Official+Results/4631020/story.html on April 2, 2012.