Competitive

I am, shall we say, a wee bit on the competitive side.  More so with myself than when participating in team games.  That is to say when I play hockey in the winter I want to win and I have way more fun when we are winning, but I don’t lose my head over the game, but when it comes to beating previous best times or scores or whatever I can be just a tiny bit OCD about the whole thing.

When that OCD part was pointed out to me this morning after karate during a discussion about running I thought it was a bit funny, but as I have had time to think about it now, it’s totally true.  Take this morning’s run for example.

As you know if you read this blog with any regularity I am training for a race the goes on September 3rd and in doing so I have been running ever lengthening distances for the past seven weeks now, 5.2Km, then 8, then 10.  Today, the seventh Saturday in my training I planned to run 12Km.  I planned this because the race itself is 10Km and I thought I should run further than the actual race, so that on race day I have something left in the tank.  So what I did was use my 10Km route and tack on a 2Km loop on the end so that I could still get my time from the 10Km to compare to last week.  This it turns out was a bad idea, because due to my need to do better than the week before I practically sprinted the final 1.6Km just so that I could beat the time from last week.  When I was done with that I simply could not make my legs work any longer and had to give up on the extra 2Km after attempting twice to run after I had crossed the 10Km finish line.

I was told that I have to let go of the time issue if I am going to enjoy running, but I am fairly certain that both of those things will never happen.  So in that way my competitiveness is bad for me, it did actually prevent me from accomplishing my distance goal today because I know that had I just kept trucking along at my usual pace, accepting a slightly higher time than last week, I would have done the extra distance no problem.

However it’s come in handy to be this way a number of other times, but I thought it was a great compliment a few weeks ago while on a training trail run with Jodi (my trainer) when she said she loved training me because I always push for that next goal. I always want to be better than I was the last time I did an exercise or a bike ride or a run.

The solution to today’s issue is simple, plan out a different 12Km route but know where the 10Km mark is, so I can compare times, but accept that it’s a different route so any difference in time can be rationalized that way and then continue to finish the 12Kms.  As for the OCD about keeping track of things like that, I doubt that will ever change!

Today I ran 10Km in 46:25, last week it was 46:45 and the first 10Km run was 49:10.