Some Thoughts on Competition

What happens if you’re racing yourself… but someone else thinks they’re racing you, too?

I’m lucky to be such a beginner in some ways, because no one comes up to me after a race and gets in my face about what my time was because they were hoping to beat me.  This is in part because I run pretty slow.  Chances are good that if you’re competitive enough to be looking for a rival, you’re faster than I am already.

But I’ve crossed paths with some more serious runners, and heard some stories about competitiveness that made me think.  If you follow my blog at all, you’ll know that I think running should be fun, people should figure out what makes them happiest about running and pursue it, and that everyone who gets out and runs is doing something great.

Sometimes competition is a great motivator that helps people with those goals, but sometimes it’s a complete buzz-kill because someone else is using your running time to make themselves feel better.  What does your running time have to do with them, anyway? It has to do with you, how you felt that day, how you’ve been training… it has no bearing on their success.

Some great uses for competition:

• Do hills workouts with a partner and use racing to the top as a motivator to keep both of you going
• Challenge a friend to run a certain number of miles a week to increase accountability for both of you
• Challenge yourself to keep up with a more experienced runner for a short distance
• Challenge a more experienced runner to catch you doing intervals…. after giving yourself a substantial head start.  Repeat until you figure out the point at which you finish together.
• Compete with a friend to see who can stick most closely to their training plans, percentage of runs completed wins, not fastest runner
• Join a running club and push yourself to get closer to the pace of other runners… without telling them what you’re doing
• When it motivates you to work on your running so you can keep up with those girls who run at lunch
• When you and another runner of similar abilities both enjoy trying to beat each other in a given race, it makes you each run faster, and you’re both laughing at the end (even if one of you is now paying for dinner)

• When you forget that no two runners start a race with the same body, age, gender, or training, and therefore comparing your pace with someone else’s actually says nothing.  Unless you’re running for prize money, what should matter to you is whether you were able to pick a challenging but achievable goal, work hard towards it, and achieve it.
• When there’s a one sided rivalry.  If someone is pestering you about your times because you’re a similar enough runner for them to want to beat you in all the local races, you may want to remind them you’re not competing with them.  Or you can just feel bad for them because they’re not internally motivated and therefore probably not happy.  (But if they keep coming up to you after each race and smugly informing you of their slightly superior race time, maybe you should ask them multiple times if they’re sure they’re all right, and wouldn’t they like to see a medic?  They’ll start leaving you alone.  Especially if you get your friends in on it, too.)

The best competition ever:

When Will had just learned to walk, he delighted in chasing after any runner who went by us on the nearby Brook Path.  He would run after them as fast and as long as he could, then collapse in laughter and meander down the path until the next one went by and he could chase them.  It was the most beautiful thing to watch.  He knew he couldn’t catch them, but he felt such joy and pleasure in the chase that he would do it every time one went by.  If you can find pleasure in trying to do something you know you’ll fail at, then you may do it often enough to make the dream a reality.  

Happy running 🙂




He’s having so much fun trying!  That’s what it’s really about.