Competition breeds excellence

Jojo said:
This is so nice!

I was going to reply that I’m not a competitive person at all, and if so it’s mostly against myself, ( as when i used to run, trying to beat my personal best or setting a personal goal).

However I just remembered this:

I play Wordle every day. I don’t have many talents but I’m good at Wordle There is a woman i know who used to date a friend of ours years ago. She was pretty nerdy and irritating in that she seemed to have this need to always be the smartest person in the room. She would often correct people, including their grammar. She made me afraid to express an opinion because she would always have some information she thought you needed. One time I asked her if she had a 150 IQ and she told me that she did.

I haven’t seen her for years but she used to be a friend of mine and my husband’s on Facebook. I deactivated my account quite a few years ago, but sometimes I checked in on my family using my husband’s Facebook page, mostly to check out photos of my great niece and nephew ( he gave me his password to do so). And I noticed this woman was posting her Wordle results. (The results link shows not the word, but how many tries out of 6 it takes to solve it.)

So each morning if i made a good Wordle (like three guesses, or it was a difficult word), I would ask my husband to check her results so I could compare mine. The first time i missed guessing it correctly I loved finding out that she too missed it. I had this need to beat her and her so called 150 IQ!

It’s my own little competition and she has no idea that I’m playing this game with her. So yeah, it’s pretty bad how jolly i get each morning when i find out i solved it in less tries than she did!
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Wordle 501 3/6

⬜🟨⬜⬜🟨
🟨🟨⬜🟨⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Hahaha… so today i got Wordle in three, which is good for me. Most of my guesses take me four times, (though i do have ten times in my stats where i guessed it in two tries.) And my husband tells me the 150 IQ friend I’m stalking took FOUR tries to get it. Yesterday was not an easy word and i matched her. But i really love when i beat her. Hahaha.. i wonder if this means i have a 150 IQ too!
 
I've done both casting competitions and Fly Fishing Team USA qualifiers. I didn't do them to prove I was the best - I'm definitely not. The experience I got from practicing and competing was that I learned a lot and became a better angler and caster as a result. While I'm competitive enough to want to win, and I always give it 100%, I'm happy for anyone who does better than me. Fishing is much more enjoyable when I know that if I can't make the cast or catch the fish, it's probably not a fish that can be caught. Having the skillset allows me to relax more.
 
I'm competitive enough to have risked my life for it, first on two wheels and then four. Yet never felt the need to win or be the 'best'. Some of my most memorable races were for seventh, or tenth. Always, always, feeling the need to beat the guy or gal in front of me and feeling a sense of satisfaction if I was able to. If not it drove me to try and improve.

In fishing, not so much. My long time fishing partner out fishes me at least two to one, sometimes more and it rarely bothers me.
 
In my mind are lots of memories. It sometimes they take a while to come to the front. When in High school. in PE. We usually got good grades if we did something in PE that nobody else could do. Mine was sit ups. I did 30 sit ups in 30 seconds. Got an A for that. I really couldn't do anything else as I was a small guy. 5'4" 135 lbs wringing wet. Going forward in Basic Training. I did 90 sit ups in 2 minutes. I got an extra 5 hours on my first pass. Now when I do sit ups it takes me quite a while to do 50 of them.
 
FinLuver said:
COMPETITION Breeds...
CORNHOLE CHEATERS TOO!!

MSN

www.msn.com
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This is great. The one team files a complaint accusing the other team of cheating, which they were. But then the officials quickly realize the same team complaining was also cheating.
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Chris Bellows said:
That's because HIIT training without an aerobic base does fuck all for running. There's a reason low intensity, high volume is the secret sauce for aerobic sports.
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You're not wrong. But HIIT is probably 10% or so of what we do. Still, I'm talking about going against groups of people who I'm doing all the same training with, so it's an apples to apples "competition."
 
When you put in the reps and do the prep, executing the job is way easier. Early in my career competition was absolutely necessary in order to achieve competence. At this point they are more synonymous. Do I like it, am I competitive etc? Well I like being in the game, and I like the people on my team, and I like that we are equals/peers/friends. But our game isn't zero sum, the goal isn't a triumph over someone else. It is more of a triumph over problems. I do not miss, not one bit, the kind of "competitions" and hoop jumping I had to do to get here. I do really like helping the young 'uns train for it, show them how to jump, how to compete, how to accelerate them towards competency, how to help them keep their empathy and kindness during all of it....

In a different way the things that capture my imagination are not competetions. Shaping driftwood into a creature, capturing a cool photo or cloud or bird, writing a story that has multiple levels, making a hypothesis about where the fish is and building the fly to temp it and casting it to where I think it would be. Those things don't lend themselves to competition so much as immersion and fascination, they are moments of good solitude where time seems to melt.
 
Matt Paluch said:
I've done both casting competitions and Fly Fishing Team USA qualifiers. I didn't do them to prove I was the best - I'm definitely not. The experience I got from practicing and competing was that I learned a lot and became a better angler and caster as a result. While I'm competitive enough to want to win, and I always give it 100%, I'm happy for anyone who does better than me. Fishing is much more enjoyable when I know that if I can't make the cast or catch the fish, it's probably not a fish that can be caught. Having the skillset allows me to relax more.
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Sounds like the competition drove your growt
Evan B said:
You're not wrong. But HIIT is probably 10% or so of what we do. Still, I'm talking about going against groups of people who I'm doing all the same training with, so it's an apples to apples "competition."
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Wouldn't metabolic conditioning fall under the category of high intensity training?
 
Coach Potter said:
Wouldn't metabolic conditioning fall under the category of high intensity training?
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For most things, probably. Still not the only type of training we do. But HIIT even less so. I feel like interval training is probably one of the least used workout types the last few years. We still do them, just a lot less. Either way, the point of my original post was that I was running against people who did the same training as me. So the training type that lead up to said runs doesn't really matter in the spirit of competition (if it were a competition). Now, if I had been just doing every day endurance training then went and ran against a bunch of Crossfit athletes, then I'd say it would be relevant.
 
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Nah. Example - I swung a dry fly with 0 rises on a popular summer river all day earlier this week as my buddy brought 4 steelhead to hand on a sunk scandi (including an upper teens buck). I like doing things my way regardless of the results and regardless if it's the "right" way. I think when I first started steelheading, it was more of a numbers game. Now, I'm just happy to be standing in a river when I can.
 
Evan B said:
You and I are seeking something very different from our daily gym experience ;)

Another thing to consider is how many injuries accumulate from most "regular" people trying to be that competitive (I'm very injury prone). I don't think it's a healthy approach for a huge chunk of people. Thus, there being gyms that cater to both types of athletes.

Edit: If I do get one competitive bragging right, I've never had a single person at any Crossfit gym or competition beat me in any run between 400m and 3mi. Even among the best athletes at any of the gyms I've been a part of, nobody has even come within 1min of me in a mile run even.
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I've been training and racing Ironman and half Ironman since 2019. Being competitive in distances that extreme means having the awareness of when you're pushing too hard. It's been interesting. The injury potential makes it so that the ones who back off at the right time end up finishing faster than the people who try to push through any pain. Having said that, full Ironmans are inherently unhealthy to do over a long period of time. My third and final 140.6 mile race is in Coeur d'Alene in June. After that, I'll be keeping it at 70.3 or less.
 
Matt Paluch said:
I've been training and racing Ironman and half Ironman since 2019. Being competitive in distances that extreme means having the awareness of when you're pushing too hard. It's been interesting. The injury potential makes it so that the ones who back off at the right time end up finishing faster than the people who try to push through any pain. Having said that, full Ironmans are inherently unhealthy to do over a long period of time. My third and final 140.6 mile race is in Coeur d'Alene in June. After that, I'll be keeping it at 70.3 or less.
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Yeah, my limit is like... 10mi. I never have any desire to do more than that :D - unless you count doing Hood to Coast where I do three 7mi runs in a 24hr period. That's about as close as I get to any long distances for anything.
 
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