My competitive nature
Last night, my running group did a hill workout. Rick spoke of my competitive nature "rearing its ugly head," because I was breathing hard, even though Mike had said "nice and easy." For me, "nice and easy" would have involved running only a couple repeats, and I wanted to squeeze in more. And, in fact, I must admit, I do have a competitive nature. I did want not to be behind Rick at every turn. It's not so much about staying ahead of him, though, but about, occasionally, not being last. If someone else were near my pace, I'd key off that person instead.I responded to Rick that in fact my competitive nature was "rearing its beautiful head."
Possibly some view competitiveness as ugly. And it isn't of the flowers-in-springtime poetic version of beautiful. Yet I suspect it is as inseparable from that kind of beauty as a stem is from a flower. I think of Dylan Thomas' "The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower"--the intertwining of life and death.
The force that lifts us from a prone position, out the door, into the neighborhoods and running tracks and trails is our passion for life, for experience, for blossoming... and withering.
Yet it is a necessary force. What would we do without the pain and beauty it breeds?
I count up miles, reach a "magic number" such as 50, and celebrate that. But also celebrate the journey to get there, some of it through flowers, some along a river, some breathing hard as I labor uphill, or enjoy the release of letting my feet fly downhill as I did when I was a child. I know it's important to balance these needs: the magic number that helps me believe in my capacity as a runner to blossom, to find new possibilities in me, to reach deeper, reach higher--with the blossoms and butterflies that meet me on the journey. And the sheer, stubbornness that makes me sometimes want to push past those who say "you can't" and "you shouldn't."
In her novel To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf described the paradox of the butterfly, through the eyes of artist Lily Briscoe reflecting on her painting: "Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron. It was to be a thing you could ruffle with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses.'
I want both the beauty and brightness--and the strength--of this image in my running. Butterflies so often are companions to me on the run, their flight seeming more windblown than willed. Yet they have been known to travel thousands of miles--and so, to some degree, are "clamped together with bolts of iron."
Sometimes I want to prove my worth as a runner, show Mike and others that I deserve to be taken seriously, that I may not have the speed of the faster runners, but that I have drive of my own. Yet I know it's not fair to see my efforts or even my work ethic as equal to theirs. I am chasing humbler goals--no sub-3 hour marathon, but perhaps one day one that gets me to the starting line in Boston? No sub-30 minute 10k, but maybe a faster one than I ran last time?
Competition is a chase, an adventure, inward as well as outward, and although it can't be measured by numbers, numbers enter in, just as they do into poetic rhyme and meter. Yet the goal is to both embrace and transcend the numbers.
posted by DPMcManus @ 1:46 PM
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