The comparison game
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.
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