We all know that one person. The one who gets a little too competitive at practice. The one who starts kicking it in with 400m left in a tempo run and leans at the line to win a 1k rep. That person is annoying and should save it for the race, but there definitely are some benefits to training with people who can challenge one another. After all, isn’t that why professional running teams exist–the brand wants to bring high level runners together so that they can challenge each other and therefore help each other improve. This concept is pretty simple, but in practice it’s more complicated.
The first concept to explore is how competitive should the teammates be? For example, On Athletics Club has been extremely successful recently, and they are careful about having people on the team who run the same event and are from the same country. Having representation from around the world allows athletes in the same event to help each other in workouts without worrying about losing a spot on a World or Olympic team to the other. I think this is a great model for reducing the comparison or need to one-up the other in training.
For most people, spots on World or Olympic teams are not a concern. They just want to find people to train with that push, support, and entertain them. In these cases, I think that some healthy competition in practice is perfectly fine, as long as there is an understanding about which workouts to push and which to keep casual. For example, short intervals or hill reps are a great opportunity to push the envelope because the brevity of the repetitions is less likely to lead to overtraining or fatigue and the purpose of the workout is to increase critical velocity. However, long intervals or threshold sessions should be kept casual because the goal of the workout is to be in a specific zone, not to push the envelope. In addition, over-doing these workouts is more likely to lead to injury and overtraining than to additional fitness gains.
To see an example of a workout where competition was very beneficial, watch the video below.
