The wrong attitude to competition
A story of letting fear get in the way of personal transcendence through sport
When the Sacrifices start to backfire
“Lately, I’ve been using exercise as a way to get away from my obligations and it’s making me feel guilty about my training.”
I appreciated the honesty my guy showed when we had a talk about why he was finding it difficult to stay committed to his training.
Before I get into the advice I told him and how it shifted him for a place of fear and guilt to a place of service and love, let’s back up and see how this particular situation is more of a general problem when it comes to how many view exercise as ‘their space away from it all”
It’s My Time Isn’t It?
Listen, I get it. Life is full of responsibilities and obligations, especially as a man.
We work
Provide for the family
Show up in the home
Actively parent our kids
And try to do it all while staying in shape.
It can feel like EVERYONE wants a piece of you, and then when it’s finally time to have some time for yourself, there’s nothing left.
The gym, or physical exercise, becomes an oasis away from the claims others have on you. It’s a place to immerse yourself in yourself. That one place where you can focus on you, your growth, your progress, your passion.
But here’s the problem.
Now physical exercise is an ‘escape’ away from your responsibilities.
You know the story of the ‘golf widow.’ The wife of the golfer who never sees her husband because he needs to ‘get away’ to the course on the weekend and spends 5-7 hours away on the weekends after staying late at work all week.
Exercise isn’t helping him in his family life, or to become a better version of himself. He’s just escaping. No wonder golfing leads to divorce.
But it’s not just golf, an obvious low hanging fruit, but all exercise.
Gym widows
Running widows
Biking widows
Climbing widows, etc..
Now if you’re the type of person who blames others for the failures of your life, you’re not going to see the problem with forgoing your obligations to go ‘work on yourself.’ You’ve already missed the point of self improvement, to be honest about where you are strong and weak and endeavour to make the weak parts stronger through honest action.
You just created your own prison
To the person who wants to use sport and physical activity to improve their lives outside of the physical arena, this is a terrible place to find yourself.
The activity you’ve chosen to help you become a better person, husband, father, is now actively making you worse in those areas. Instead of serving others with selfless love you are taking time away from them to become selfish in your desires.
Now that ‘oasis’ has become a prison of dread and remorse.
You can sense that you’re not getting any support, and everytime you scoot out the door for a couple of hours to ‘work on yourself’ you’re creating resentment in the people who depend on you. That leads to guilt inside yourself.
This is exactly what happened to my guy.
He’s aiming at his first big endurance race at the same time he’s balancing a young family, and a new promotion at work. His schedule is a bit all over the place, and he was beginning to have fears and doubts about his ability to perform well in the race. That fear led him to over training beyond what he should have given his responsibilities at home.
But it’s not just that, he came to me to help him use physical training to improve mental and spiritual areas of himself. And here he was, neglecting those parts for emphasis on the body.
Breaking Free: Change your Perspective
There’s a pattern that happens when we feel fear, we revert to selfish behaviour.
It makes sense. When we feel threatened we retreat into ourselves.
My guy’s fear of not performing well in a race was overtaking his ability to show up in the areas that mattered most in his life. I get the sense that all those ‘sports widows’ husbands feel the same type of fear around something in their lives, and that causes them to escape into sports.
Here’s the advice I gave to him specifically and then I’ll share some general tips on how you can avoid this same pattern.
The first thing we talked about was the overall aim of the race that was causing him fear. I asked “Are you doing the race to perform to a certain standard?”
The answer: No, I’m doing the race to challenge myself, meet people who share a passion for self-improvement through competition, and to try something new.
The answer immediately led him to the next realization
“The results don’t really matter then, do they?”
Perhaps, but this was just the opening. I probed deeper: “What is the worst case scenario you can imagine about the race?”
He thought for a moment: Probably getting injured and having to tap out.
That’s not bad enough. I had to push back.
“I think that’s actually a good case scenario, you get a legit excuse to not go far that will be accepted by other people. And ultimately, you’re fear of not performing well is more about managing your reputation to other people, because nothing you said about why you want to do the race has anything to do with results. Here’s what I think the worst case scenario is: You don’t get injured, you show up and think you have a great day ahead, but you STILL crap our after 3 or 4 laps and you have no ‘legit’ excuse to fall back on. You just laid an egg without any reason except you didn’t ‘train’ or come ‘prepared’ enough.”
This hit HARD. Because it was the truth. And it immediately made his fears about the race fade away.
This had a huge impact on his fitness moving forward. Now he didn’t feel anxiety about needing to hit certain metrics on his training, mainly getting in those long runs. Instead, he began experimenting with shorter sprint style runs that tested his fitness, but didn’t take him more than 20-30 minutes of time and he could do on the streets around his house.
He was BACK to using fitness as a guide to becoming a better person, instead of just focusing on his own physical performance.
Your turn to apply
I see this ALL THE TIME for people in the gym and especially for those chasing performance goals in competition. They lose the forest for the trees. Overemphasising ONE competition at the expense of their other priorities and obligations.
This is one of the big reasons why adults don’t celebrate competing in sports as an ‘amateur.’
It’s viewed as selfish, a waste of time, and potential for injury. I don’t blame them either. When someone is selfish, neglecting responsibilities, and pretending they are professional when they aren’t, it’s not a great look on their character.
So here’s my general advice for two types of people that suffer from this hyper competitive tendency in competition
The first person is the one who is afraid they will let the competition overtake them, similar to what happened to my guy and our race
The second person is the one who hasn’t been involved in competition and sees it as an arena where bad character rules
To the first person:
You need to reframe the meaning of the competition and your training in a similar way that I was able to help my guy reframe his training.
You need to anchor the competition into a larger framework of a lifelong pursuit.
Aristotle teaches us that the highest good we can aim for in our lives (eudaimonia) MUST be a lifelong journey, not simply a single goal one can reach and then move to the side.
My advice is to root your training in the service of building your character.
That the reason you train is to become your best self in body, mind, and spirit
There is not one competition alone that can help you accomplish this
It’s a pursuit without a definite end.
But that process keeps you disciplined and engaged in the training. It decreases the pressure on any one competition or training block, and instead you can zoom out and see how each goal interlocks in this larger journey.
To the second person:
That’s similar to the advice I’d give to the second type of person here too.
Look, competition is scary, it’s a public performance. There’s no where to hide. It’s brutally honest. GOOD. You need to put yourself out there.
But just like the first type of person, you cannot let the numbers or results on the competition overtake the reason WHY you compete.
That’s what tends to let the bad characters overtake the good characters. It’s easy to point to the world of commercial sport and its overwhelming economic incentives as the example that rules all of sports competition. But that’s just not the truth.
For example, take the ultra running community.
There are formal races, serious competitors, and sometimes big stakes. But the overall feels of these events is camaraderie, teamwork, mutual support, and love.
My fave story from the ultra running world comes from a 2016 attempt to set the Fastest Known Time on the Appalachian trail heading south from Maine to Georgia. Ultra runner Kurt Meltzer aimed to beat Scott Jurek’s record and was going to break it. On the final day on the run, Jurek flew down and ran the final part of the trail with Meltzer celebrating with him as he broke his own record. Amazing example of the spirit of community in the ultra running world at the highest levels.
When you fit a competition into a larger framework of a lifetime pursuit of better character, then the race or competition becomes a place for you to showcase your internal work and proclaim your talent and determination to use challenge as means of growth. The numbers don’t matter. The outside opinions don’t matter. The bad conduct of other competitors don’t matter. You run your own race and use it to fuel the growth you want to realise within yourself.
So here’s what you can do
Sign up for a competition and aim at subjective goals
Find a community that cares more about ‘playing’ than winning
Reject the fear that comes from focusing too much on your ‘reputation’
Use love and passion to let the highest part of yourself emerge through competition
Do these and you’ll have the foundation of realizing the value of all the sacrifices you make when you have the desire to train and compete in sports.
If you see a bit of yourself in the story of my athlete and want to see that same success in your own life, use the button below to send me a message and let’s connect and work on realizing those gains for you.
Happy competitng my friends!