When I was in high school, I competed against people in my area. Mostly my conference, maybe other local schools. If I saw a team from a school that was a 2 hour drive away, I must have been at a big meet. With such a small talent pool, it wasn’t hard with a lot of hard work to be one of the better competitors and feel good about myself.
Now, I see my daughter and her teammates competing at times against runners from not just a 4-5 hour drive away but sometimes even runners from multiple states away. Even when they aren’t facing teams from far flung locations, every week they are facing some of the best teams in the state. And this seems to be the new normal. In fact, they don’t travel as much as some teams do. Plus, we have Mile Split and other results and ranking sites telling them how they stack up against every runner or team in the country.
Meanwhile, I’m on Strava and Athlinks, where I can compare my race results and, a bigger concern in my mind, my training to seemingly every runner in the world.
Is all of this a good thing? In a way, probably. In several ways, no.
Why not and what should we do about it?
Small fish in a big pond
I do not at all envy so many high schoolers out there. When I was in high school, as I mentioned, a good amount of hard work would have even the least talented runner, even me, competing well enough against the local competition that they could feel good about themselves. Even I could win some races, place high in an invitational or two and have some nice accomplishments. I never had to compare myself to runners like Gabe Jennings, even though he was in the same state as me.
Now, we have all star meets everywhere. Sometimes, it seems like there are weekly options to run against all of the best in your state and some of the best in nearby states. Even if a runner is on a schedule more like mine was, results from around the state are online and Mile Split is out there aggregating the results and reminding them that they don’t even rank in the top 20 or 50 or 100 in the state. It’s much harder to feel accomplished even after putting in the hard work unless you’re combining that hard work with a lot of talent and you truly are one of the best in the state.
We used to be able to compare at a local level and feel good about ourselves. This would allow us to feel accomplished, even if there were many others out there who were just as good as us, if not better. When we feel better about ourselves, we are more likely to remain motivated and continue in the sport. Now, even if someone is very good, they are comparing themselves to a much larger talent pool. At least a statewide talent pool, if not nationwide. As a result, fewer people feel highly accomplished. My fear is that this will discourage some runners from continuing their pursuits and they will lose out on the lifelong benefits of the sport.
To the younger runners out there: please be careful to not fall into this trap of saying you are “only” the 30th best or 70th best runner in the state. 30th or 70th best out of the thousands of runners across the state is still amazing. If you like the sport, if you’re willing to work hard, there’s a place for you somewhere in the sport.
This also applies to older runners, thanks to things like Athlinks, Strava and the growing popularity of mega races like the World Marathon Majors.
Comparing everything, including training
Even more concerning to me is our ability to compare our training with others. Strava lets us share our training with whoever we want and see the training of whoever is willing to share with us.
This can be dangerous because it’s easy to compare your training to another and think you need to be doing what they are doing, even though we all are different. It can also lead us to get competitive with our training runs, which is a slippery slope leading to overtraining and potentially injury.
I’m sure many of us have been there at some point. Some runner we either admire or feel like we’re competitive against is knocking out very impressive training. We want to try to match them and are tempted to run our easy runs too fast or too long or try to do a workout that is beyond our capacity.
Do you fight the temptation? I hope so. Stick to your training that is geared toward you. Some people have a higher training capacity and a need to train at a higher level to match the performances of others.
On the flip side, if you haven’t experienced the above, maybe you’ve experienced what I have. You see some runner you’re competitive with doing far less training than you and start wondering what’s wrong with your training. You might start second guessing yourself. Am I doing something wrong that I have to train so much harder to get the same results? Maybe others even see your training and tell you that, with that training, you should be accomplishing a lot more.
Again, fight the temptation to think this way. Like me, you probably are just working with less raw ability to run fast and need to train at a higher level to get to the same performance level as someone else. As long as you are handling the training and are good with the efforts you have to put forth, there’s not a problem with this. There are different paths to success, not to mention different definitions of success.
In the end, the comparison game can be dangerous and has gotten more risky over time due to the large amount of data available now. It feels like we know everything about everyone and can compare ourselves with everyone. The problem is we don’t know everything and comparisons without full context can be dangerous.
I’m not saying don’t be social, just stick your head in the sand and don’t pay attention to what’s out there. However, be careful as you do so that you don’t start comparing yourself to others in ways that will do more harm than good.