“I once called COMPETITION the new “C” word because it scares people so much.”
Saturday night at the Great Park. America’s biggest cross country meet raced under the lights. Arrived at 1 pm and stayed until almost midnight. Usually, the Woodbridge Invitational competes late to avoid mid-September heat. This year, the weather was cool and damp enough that I put on a sweatshirt at 3 and kept it on until the bitter end. As those who know me will attest, I will find any excuse to wear a sweatshirt.
Thousands of competitors from more than a dozen states. So many spectators clogging the pathways that I felt I was at the LA Coliseum watching a college football game. The Santa Margarita squad ran well enough that the training was validated. Woodbridge is not my favorite meet because it’s flat as a drag strip and the racing is just as scorching. I like real cross country, with hills and dust and tactics instead of a three-mile sprint (yes, there is such a thing). But it’s great for procuring data because every team that matters in our state division shows up. I get to see who’s fast and who’s not. Helps me calibrate our training, which is why the first thing I did this morning is find online results and start comparing apples to apples with other teams. We’re fifteen weeks into a twenty-four week season and last night it just got real. The Trabuco meet was for busting off the rust. Hawaii was a team-building getaway. But from now on I know what it will take to win State.
I printed out First Pass from Taking London yesterday before driving the ten miles to the meet. Brought my Yeti chair so I would have a comfortable place to sit beneath the team canopy and edit pages between races. I am good at shutting out the world when I work on my writing, so taking a pencil to the manuscript with the sounds of a race announcer over the loudspeaker, runners showing up for their races, questions from team parents, and the hubbub of a major sporting event don’t bother me at all. I mentally transport myself back to London 1940, look for word repetition and sentences that make no sense at all (how did I miss those in the first place?), and the occasional chance to take a mundane bunch of words and turn them into something that makes my heart happy. There is no cognitive dissonance. Coaching cross country and writing books are something I do every day. Granted, writing is in the mornings and coaching is for afternoons, but combining them at a meet is no big deal.
The reason is competition.
I love to compete. I compete at everything. I compete even when people don’t know we’re competing — though I think they do. I wouldn’t coach if it just meant showing up and being enthusiastic. I write because I love it but also because I want to be my best. I did a Zoom call with a book club out of Atlanta last week and they got me talking about writers I admire. I mentioned a few (John le Carre, Amor Towles, Jim Harrison, that author who wrote Lessons in Chemistry). But once we started talking writing I couldn’t help myself. I talked about reading books and catching writers taking shortcuts, something that I only know about because I take the same shortcuts myself. Catching myself in the act, then discussing it out loud is like the sacrament of confession. Which can be very much a form of personal competition.
I once called competition the new “C” word because it scares people so much. And I still think that’s true.
But at Woodbridge I watched normally laid back men and women scream at the top of their lungs for their child to run faster, to be their very best, as if their words could coax those young legs to run like Jakob Ingibritsen’s. It made my night to see this primal human emotion and then the joy on the faces of parents and runners when they reunited afterward, one quite sweaty and out of breath, the others glowing with pride that their child had just pushed their limits. Not because their runner won, but because they dared. I assure you our runner who broke thirty minutes for the first time pushed himself into the unknown as much as the guy who went 14:20. Competition brings out the best in us all. Nothing to be scared of.
I got home at midnight. Calene waited up. We watched a little TV but I wasn’t much fun, silent and exhausted, thinking about the pros and cons of the meet, while also thinking about a turn of phrase on page 102 of Taking London that needs to be sharper. It’s a mystery I’m trying to unlock. Just like concocting the proper cocktail of workouts for my runners, I’ll take those sixteen words and rewrite them until they say something special. It’s the first time I’ve ever used the word “retinal” in a book, a technical term that can be ponderous but which I’m trying very hard to sound cool enough that it brings the reader straight into the moment. Look for it next June and let me know if it works. Most people don’t think sixteen words out of 400 pages matter, but I’ll know if it’s not all it can be. Just like I know that a kid who runs fifteen minutes for three miles can run thirty seconds faster if I give the training enough love.
I tell my runners all the time that it’s the little things that matter: sleep, hydration, stretching; making “retinal” sound cool AF, seeking out word repetitions, helping a clumsy sentence find its way, turning it into something as compelling as Clapton’s “Layla” guitar lick.
So say three Our Fathers and two Hail Mary’s and don’t fear the new “C” word. Competition can be life-changing, one challenge at a time.
Martin Dugard is a best-selling author, a board member of the USA Track & Field Foundation and a high school cross country and track coach.
