There’s some bad news for women running in Saturday’s Kansas City Marathon.

According to researchers in Japan, men not only sweat more than woman, but they also are more efficient at sweating.

Scientists at Osaka International University and Kobe University had four groups of subjects (trained males and females and untrained males and females) to cycle continuously for an hour in a controlled climate with increasing intensity intervals.

The results showed that men are more efficient at sweating. While exercise training improves sweating in both sexes, the improvement is greater in men, and the difference is more prominent as the level of exercise intensity increases. Untrained females had the worst sweating response of all and required a higher body temperature than the other groups to begin sweating.

That means women need to get hotter than men before they get sweaty. And sweat is important because it cools the skin.

“It appears that women are at a disadvantage when they need to sweat a lot during exercise, especially in hot conditions,” Yoshimitsu Inoue, the study’s coordinator and a researcher at Osaka International University in Japan said in an interview with science news website LiveScience.

Inoue theorized that there may explain why there is a difference in heat tolerances between the sexes.

“Women generally have less body fluid than men and may become dehydrated more easily,” Inoue said. “Therefore, the lower sweat loss in women may be an adaptation strategy that attaches importance to survival in a hot environment, while the higher sweat rate in men may be a strategy for greater efficiency of action or labor.”

The good news — for all runners, not just women — is the temperature for the start of Saturday’s race should be around 50 degrees.

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