Competition breeds excellence

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.

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.
 
Rogers guy, eh?

An interesting thread, and look into some of my fellow anglers.

I'm not into competition between myself and other fly anglers.

But some of us, it seems, are.

Best wishes and happiness to you. I'm not gonna be any fun for ya. If I was fishing to eat, I'd do it differently.
HELL NO…North Central Indians. We were ghetto but not Rogers Pirates ghetto. See all the red and black and Indian head silhouettes in the background?
 
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!
Screenshot_20221016-001857.png

😉
 
I wouldn't really consider myself as being all that competitive....at least when it comes to fishing. I can't tell you how stoked I was to be able to net 3 of my friend's first tiger muskies last year...was hoping for another this year, but alas they did a nice LDR before I could get there...yeah, I'm blaming them....;)

I'm always super stoked when I'm catching fish, but it kinda sucks if I'm the ONLY one catching.

Shit, my preferred quarry doesn't give up her secrets easily, so if it were ALL about getting fish into the net, I might be be doing it wrong.
 
I can't tell you how many hundreds if not thousands of miles I ran listening to this song back in the day. And with every step all I could think about was destroying anyone who got in the way way of achieving my goal. To this day I still get chills whenever I hear it.



Swimmy
2x GA state wrestling Champ
1996 Georgia Wrestler of the Year
125 lbs of pure stomp ass

Did you have a signature move with a kick ass name, like the stone cold stunner or the tombstone?
 
^^^
JSDFwlvf_o.gif
I'd love to be offended but I'm laughing too hard.

Up early this morning. Going to meet @Evan B and @Coach Potter to get a few laps in.

The time your game is most vulnerable is when you're ahead. #neverletup

Brian_Shute_Vision_Quest_telephone_pole.jpg
 
I'm a process guy. Joy in the effort and the lessons. Compete against myself everytime... "what could I have done better?" is a nagging question.

But the other day... buddy was lightin' it up and was feeling anxious for a bit... happy for him, frustrated with myself.

I seek to understand the "how and why" I can improve, or haven't.

A lot of the emotional weirdness associated with progress or lack there of fades with increased understanding of process and acceptance of one's limitations.

It's those naive and ignorant times that bring me the most frustration and also generates the greatest drive.

I still dont like to lose, but if I do, I better understand why.
 
^^^
JSDFwlvf_o.gif
I'd love to be offended but I'm laughing too hard.

Up early this morning. Going to meet @Evan B and @Coach Potter to get a few laps in.

The time your game is most vulnerable is when you're ahead. #neverletup

Brian_Shute_Vision_Quest_telephone_pole.jpg
My dad was a wrestler, I totally understand the dangers of wrestlers. The hardest of the core.
 
I don't care how many more fish you catch than I do when we fish together. Maybe that's because I like to fish alone. When I fish alone I can go and come back when my little heart desires to. When you fish with another person there is usually a wait period involved. I just hate to wait on anything. But this isn't a post on waiting.


It's that 25 cent word that I can't spell with out looking at it as I try to spell it. Competition. There isn't competitive bone in my body. When I come on here. Shit there it goes again. I had something on my mind and when I turned my head it left me. No, I come on here to have fun. Like when I get out to fish. It's just getting out is the only drug I need. If I catch something, that's fine and if I want to quit for the day I can. If I don't catch anything, that's fine also. I was out in the great outdoor doing what I like. And at my age just getting out is the problem. The body is willing but the brain isn't. Or maybe it's the other wat around.

This is enough Bullshit for today. When I try to type a note this long it takes me a long time to do it. I have to correct all my mistakes before I send it. This is about the only thing that I try to do right. I don't abbreviate anything. Putting words to text is just something I strive to do right. I can't help it because I'm nuts.


I am nuts too.
 
Competitiveness. Not particularly.

I generally fish alone. When I team up with someone it requires some planning and arrangements. I prefer spontaneity. I do go primarily to meditate and enjoy the whole experience of water, the quiet the natural sounds the enticing and search for fish. Memories are created, poems are written and paintings are inspired. I took a friend to the coast perhaps 25 years ago. He was a coworker i worked with every work day . We built big museum exhibits together. He had never fished before. He grew up in the heart of New York city. We fly fished in a jungle like stream that trickled into the ocean near the mouth of the Columbia. There was suck your boots off mud and downed trees and black water , tide changes brought in src in large sparkling schools in tiny holding water. There were a few river otters and a lot of black bear making noise meandering through the thick brush in the understory surrounding the little stream.

Franc used my gear that i set up and the memories I have can be encapsulated in a mind image of him standing on a treacherous scramble on an old cedar snag over a deep dark pocket, 6’ above the pool, holding an 18” searun in my oversized baggy waders and a NY Yankees cap turned backwards. That experience he brought up in a recent message conversation. “You tried to kill me ya bastich! “ what I really heard in his words was “Thank you!” That right there is not competitive , it is a form of love.
 
I’ve reached a point where I don’t really care if I catch a fish, with declining populations of steelhead it’s not realistic to expect to get one every time I go so I focus more on the total experience of being in a beautiful place; might get lucky and see the river otter on the opposite bank, the GB Heron is usually on patrol and maybe a kingfisher. As I was preparing to step into the water to cross to the island where my favorite run lies on the other side several does came out of the brush just upstream and crossed to the island and a minute later a nice 4 point buck followed them. I could have touched him with my rod tip.

Getting a two handed cast out that snaps your loops back into the reel, a perfect mend to a greased line drift…..

I’ve had the pleasure of helping 3 friends get their first steelhead, giving them first shot at the bucket(s), or front position in the boat. one memorable trip my friend went 5 for 6 while I got one. One of the best fishing days ever when he told me “ now I get it”. A year later he had a stroke and hasn’t been able to fish (yet) but still talks about that day and says it’s helping him in recovery so he can get back out there.
 
I'm probably more competitive than I admit to myself, but I'm also not outwardly competitive to the point anyone would be aware. With hobbies I'm just out to have a good time, and I'm not really too competitive but will occasionally find myself giving a little extra effort to catch the mountain biker ahead of me or make sure the one behind me doesn't catch me, but it's mostly about the smiles per mile for me. Never been a big fan of games because I don't have enough interest to be good at them and I dislike being bad, so I just skip them. I'm more worried about not being bad at things than being the best which is easy because I'm pretty good at most things. ;) Jack of all trades, master of none. I really like the 80:20 principal. 80% of the success with 20% of the effort. I have too many interests to get that last 20% down.
 
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