Competing sucks

I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences between my soulmate and I when it comes to travelling by bike, and I can’t help but wonder whether the essence of those differences is in the way sport itself is configured to be a competition.

For me a bike is simply a means of transport and I see every leg of the journey ahead of me as a long bunch of hours where I’ll need to save my energy and keep my moods up. So I prefer to go slowly, have some snack every couple of hours and enjoy the landscape. I love stopping whenever I want to, taking a deep breath and listening to the sounds of nature.

For my companion I believe high priority is sticking to his original schedule, making as many kilometres as possible and arriving early. He does enjoy the landscape as well, in his own way, but slow means painful to him.

Obviously there are many advantages to planning your trip well ahead and knowing the time you’ll need to get to places. For a start you may have visa restrictions to stay in any given country, for which you need to take into account the months you’ll have to stretch your journey between borders. And for certain areas it’s not advisable to arrive at dusk and improvise on the place where you’ll overnight, unless you’re some kind of crazy adventurer in search for glory, an adrenaline kick or a Darwin Award.

However, apart from some sensible planning ahead, I don’t see why we need the hassle of keeping track of so many numbers. I don’t pride in the amount of kilometres or days I’ve travelled. The trip is the journey, right? Not the destination.

So here comes my statement that competing (even against oneself) sucks. There’s no need to compare the number of kilometres you did today with those you did yesterday. There’s no point in looking back and shouting with pride, ‘Look how far we’ve got!’  I think the key to enjoying a trip is appreciating every single day as a unique moment in time you don’t need to compare with any other point in the past, since every day you’ll have seen different lands and people, you’ll have lived new situations, and you’ll also be older and wiser than the day before. Living to live another day, isn’t that enough of an achievement?

And by thinking about all this I came to realise that the essence of most sports is comparing your results with others’, and that’s why for many people (including myself) sports suck so much. Don’t take me wrong – Doing exercise is great. It’s very necessary to keep fit and healthy, but most sports suck because they’re based on a competition, and competing sucks. It takes out all the joy of simply exercising your muscles.

Leaders of the world, let me tell you why you have so many obese people in the countries you rule: because you failed at teaching them, when they were young, how they should do exercise. You didn’t introduce children to enjoying sport, but instead you made them compete against each other and fail, and in that process they got frustrated and abandoned trying.

This also leads us to the very essence of gender differences in this world ruled by men, where women are forced to believe since the day they’re born they’re insecure, weak and fragile creatures. Being a woman and wanting to get to the top, you’ll often feel you need to compete with men and you don’t have what it takes. So you’ll waste so much time and effort building on your strengths and your confidence, that you usually miss the real point, which is looking beyond your nose and enjoying the landscape. Susan Colantuono exposes this problem brilliantly in her speech The career advice you probably didn’t get – Women don’t get to break through the glass ceiling because they’re so worried about losing the race on a confidence issue, that they forget to focus on their real muscle: knowledge.

But again, who would want to break through the glass ceiling when you can sit so comfy below, look through it and have a laugh? We all have to die one day. Who’s enjoying life more?

Food for thought.