I was looking at the results of the prestigious 5th Avenue Mile. This is a world-class race with the most elite runners in the world. There were, of course, all these super elite runners who ran miles under 4 minutes, which is expected.
But as I scrolled down the results, I saw some very familiar names. I grew up in New York and on Long Island, so naturally, a lot of people I ran with in high school gravitated toward New York City.
And then I saw two guys, John and Jeff (not their real names), who ran the Fifth Avenue Mile in 4:23.
“4:23! How’d they get so fast? I used to steamroll them in high school,” I thought.
And it’s true — I didn’t use to beat John and Jeff all the time, but they were people on my level of speed and fitness. When we were 16, I could go toe to toe with them. I had a pretty good chance of just sitting on them and maybe having enough left to outsprint them at the line. This was when we were struggling to break 4:50 in the miles.
But now, I didn’t stand a chance. While they are studs, I am now a hobby jogger who barely has time to run. My best mile time is still in the 4:30s in college. After I saw John and Jeff ran a 4:23 mile, however, I started taking my training a lot more seriously. Although I’m not training to run a 4:20 mile, I am training to run my best time in the marathon, rebounding from bouts of illness and injury. The day after I saw the results, I got motivated a hard 14-mile workout that showed I’m close to the best fitness in my life:
“If John and Jeff can run 4:23 in the mile, I can break 2:30 in the marathon.”
It’s not the best way to think, but we still think it
Anyone can tell you that’s not the most healthy line of thinking. It can be unhealthy to compare yourself to others in that capacity. Everyone is on their own path, and that kind of comparison is kind of useless when we’re not high school athletes anymore, but grown-ass adults with jobs, school, possibly kids, and more. Comparison is a means of reducing the other person in your mind, and elevating yourself.
Still, this isn’t a fairy-tale world of spirituality, as much as I would like to believe it. I know all the above facts about comparison are true, and yet I still feel a compulsion and borderline exhilaration to compare myself to John and Jack and try to go toe to toe with them again.
I buy into male competitiveness as much as the next 25-year-old man, and although I’ll never explicitly say “I want to be faster than those guys now because I used to smack down on them all the time,” I definitely think it.
It’s vain and prideful. A couple of years ago I would have had an internal war where I chastised myself for this line of thinking. However, I have come to accept that we’re all imperfect, complex human beings that don’t always have the purest motivations. This isn’t to excuse demeaning and vain mindsets, but an acceptance that sometimes, we do whatever we can to get to the next moment.
To some degree, we all do this. Outside of running, I’m working a full-time job in the school system in special education administration, and I’m in law school at night, in class from 6:30–9:30 four days a week. How I find time to do anything else is beyond me, and it’s been a struggle to find balance and free time to get out of the grind.
But one of my law school professors admitted the reason he went to law school. It wasn’t to save the world, make the world a better place, or even the brutally honest and sell-out rationale of “I want to make a lot of money and have a great lifestyle.”
He said he didn’t really know what he wanted to do after college and had no idea what being a lawyer entailed. One of his friends, however, got into a prestigious law school and did pretty well. This one of his friends wasn’t necessarily the most studious, and he was an average to below average student in high school. But he was suddenly ushering in a new era of achievement, one that opened the realm of possibility for the rest of his friends.
“Well, if this guy can do well in law school, I can too,” my professor said.
Now, my professor is a federal judge and a very accomplished attorney. He was telling the story pretty facetiously, so I’m sure he wasn’t just motivated to compete with his friend, as law school is a pretty big life decision.
But, it still probably played a somewhat minor factor.
Sometimes you just cling to whatever gets you to the next moment
There’s a certain sense of masculinity that this is just how men compete with each other. As someone who taught special ed in middle schools and high schools for three years, I saw this among teenagers too. Boys will be ultra-competitive and try to one-up each other — grown men do this too, just in more respectable and filtered ways.
I often joke that I could intervene in fights between teenage boys. Boys can often get into fights and be friends the next day. Fights between teenage girls, however, are on a whole different level.
I digress, but at the end of the day, we’re not angels motivated by purity and holiness (at least not all the time). We try to be, and we try to do good by whatever we believe and our moral compass. But in the pursuit of morality, it’s rational to still think imperfectly.
I’ve been thinking recently about whether we should be judged by our thoughts. I say this as I’ve become a lot more mature, and when I think things that would be completely terrible and hurtful to others to say out loud. Of course, everything goes through a filter of what is polite and respectable to say to others. It may be disingenuous to not say everything I think, but I do think the people around me would be much worse off if I did say everything I thought.
To me, we can’t control what we think. But we control what we say, and we control how we treat others.
Getting motivated by the wrong things is a form of not always having the best thoughts, but we filter those thoughts as we get older into more refined speech and outward expressions.
I realize every grown adult has this filter. If everyone said everything they thought, would the world really be a better place? Probably not. Grown adults may, like me, think prideful, vain, and other negative thoughts, but they also don’t say everything they think for the sake of themselves and others.
Takeaways
There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance to being human and having to survive and live in this world. I think we just cling to whatever we need to get to the next moment, whether it’s a healthy thought or unhealthy thought. I wouldn’t say thoughts are inherently right or wrong because we don’t control them.
But as human beings, we think and believe whatever we need to get by. For me, comparing myself to John and Jack may just be a way to push myself and push the boundaries of what I myself am capable of. It’s not a rational belief, but it is a belief regardless.
John and Jack are not professional runners or celebrities — they’re working, like me, and have gone to school while they worked, like me. They’re not Olympic-level runners that I have no business comparing myself to, but average working guys I deem comparable and accessible. Some people are in your league, and some people aren’t.
Trying to get back to their level is fun because it’s one of the only times my mind isn’t so focused on school and work.
On a broader level, I think it’s okay we’re not always paragons of purity and virtue. It’s not license to be a bad person. But it’s license to just live a bit and allow yourself to be a regular person.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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