Competition

I have to admit that I've really caught the triathlon bug and hope to continue with it next year following ski season. Earlier, I wrote about my addiction to endorphins. However the high from an endorphin rush is not the only reason I've been having such a good time with triathlon training. This other reason has been simmering in my brain the last few weeks. Quite simply, I love competing against other people.

In races, you are either the rabbit or you're chasing the rabbit. If you're the rabbit, you want to work as hard as you can to keep the others from passing you. I know this sounds incredibly unfriendly. But the best part of being the rabbit is when you break the people chasing you. At the moment, I look back and see the look in their eyes that they can't catch me, I feel an instantaneous sense of joy. Although we weren't racing, this is the same feeling I had when going on ski tours and pushing the pace to the point where others would never be able to catch me. (Yes, I realize that this isn't exactly safe in the backcountry and only did it during extremely conditions where everyone knew where they were going.)

While being the rabbit brings a moment of euphoria if you win, I feel that the greater pleasure (and pain) comes from chasing the rabbit. On our triathlon team, I've established a pretty competition with a girl named Cassie. On Saturday, we had a 40k time trial. Although I started out ahead, she passed me by the end of lap two and due to a series of mistakes I was still far behind going into the final lap. I don't know what came over me, but somewhere inside I found a ton of untapped energy, was able to increase my speed by a few mph, and passed her with 1/3 of a lap to go. Although she ended up beating me by 30 seconds in the actual time trial, it was an awesome feeling to have caught up to her, passed her, and opened up a comfortable lead. It's the pleasure of setting a goal, executing a plan, and seeing it succeed.

Even though I'm talking about competition, I'm not going to talk about losing because losing sucks. The only good thing about it is that it provides you with motivation either to stay ahead (if you're the rabbit) or to catch up (if you're chasing the rabbit).