Are we here to win or to set ourselves free?

Too much focus on individual competition can distract us from the greatest personal gifts of an athletic life. Instead of celebrating our moment to run free in nature we can find ourselves divided, conquered, and burned out.

Our culture’s relationship with athletic energy mirrors deeper patterns in our society. We invent arbitrary sports, write rule books and hire some judges, make a really big deal of winning and losing, and glorify individual accomplishments. Competitive performance sometimes gets such a high priority that many athletes start to specialize (and even burn out) as fairly young children in an attempt to maximize their individual performance potential in one sport. This is actually not good for their overall physical development. Modern competitive sports can be a lot of fun, can give us healthy outlets to channel certain energies, and can teach us many valuable lessons. However, it’s helpful to maintain perspective to keep our athletic pursuits healthy, balanced, and in support of our values.

Western civilization loves to separate us as individuals and pit us against each other. We do this in our economic systems, our educational institutions, and our athletic lives. This emphasis appears to be out of balance with a more natural expression of individual competition for our species. Like all complex social animals, our behavior will always include some mix of competition and cooperation. Competition’s not either a “good” or “bad” thing; it’s just one part of our nature. As primates, we have some innate competitive instincts within groups to establish dominance and to compete for mates. If we don’t give competition appropriate social channels we become unhealthy on a personal or societal level, and the same is true if we orient ourselves too strongly around competing.

In human groups, cooperation is prioritized over competition. This makes complex civilization possible. It was true in Paleolithic times as well; cooperation and group identity allowed us to work together to survive in challenging natural environments and hunt dangerous animals like mammoths, saber-toothed cats, and cave bears. From a survival perspective, it would make more sense to support and help develop any weak links in our groups rather than celebrate our individual superiority over our weaker brothers.

Particularly as we become adults, many of the channels available to athletes who are serious about training and progressing tend to focus our attention on individual competition and highly specialized pursuits (for example, endurance running races, cycling races, and triathlons). These can be fun healthy outlets or they can become unhealthy traps for us. We all react differently and our reactions provide a great opportunity to examine what we really value in our lives. Some of us enjoy a spirited race, like to develop further skills and strength, but don’t attach any particular importance to the outcome. However, some of us believe that our individual competitive or performance outcomes are the highest priority or bear some relation to our value as people.

For those of us who obsess about individual competition or pin our own self-worth on victories, rankings or other external achievements, we find ourselves in an absurd and endless chase with no true and lasting celebration at the finish line. A victory is quickly forgotten as we focus on the one we have not yet attained, and a silver medal is just never gold enough. For those of us striving to be the “best,” this is the ultimate doomed struggle against reality. “Best” is a concept with no significance in nature and that actually defies the natural truth of the smallness and brevity of a human life.

When competitive fixations show up in our lives, it can be useful to treat them as powerful calls for freedom. If we seize our opportunity and defeat obsession with where we are in the race we gain the ability to break free in our broader lives. Divide et impera (Latin for “divide and rule”) is an ingredient that is baked into the core of our civilization’s DNA. It was an effective political and military strategy described in ancient Greek and Roman sources which was useful in creating the classical Western empires. To some degree, the principle still enslaves us today. By focusing so much of our attention on competing for relative measures of “success” in specialized ways, we steer people away from paths leading to personal freedom.

Although some of us do have slightly greater genetic strength potential than others, history demonstrates that we are all meant to be strong and highly capable of doing powerful things in our natural environments. Really competitive people can help themselves by examining whether their competitive pursuits are contributing to their development, serving as a healthy outlet for a natural energy, and are continuing to bring them joy and inspiration. We benefit from being honest with ourselves if we find that we start to become slaves to our training and our desired performance outcomes. Our hearts generally tell us whether our competitive pursuits are healthy or unhealthy. Our ability to stay joyful regardless of any performance outcome is actually a really simple but effective barometer. The weight we attach to a performance outcome in the stories we tell ourselves is another.

So... are you here to win or to set yourself free? If you’re simply hoping to be the strongest version of yourself and want to give winning your best shot, the path is actually fairly straightforward assuming that you are willing to endure some pain and discipline. However, if you’re like me and it’s freedom that you truly seek in your heart, it’s time to stare into the flames and start getting ready for a somewhat wilder training path.