Competition teaches you things about yourself.

Super competitive v. quitter?

How to win.

How to lose.

Honest v. Cheater?

Every spring, my workplace does a walk/run challenge. The rules are simple, and there are many rewards to be given out. Hit a specific weekly mileage— bam! You’re entered into a drawing. But of course, there are always the top prizes. 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place in the competition overall. These are usually gift cards, company merch… things like that.

And, of course, the bragging rights.

Now, if it were up to me, the walk/run challenge would only be road miles. Because road miles are the most challenging miles. Mountains don’t just pop up on a treadmill, right? And don’t even get me started on elliptical miles. (I say this as someone who owns an elliptical.)

These work challenges always go the same way for me. If I pay attention to them, I get super competitive. So I usually just log my miles and try not to pay attention to the weekly ranking. Why, you ask, do I join the challenge if I don’t go all guns blazing? Mostly because my default miles get me into the weekly top three without going crazy. Why not join if your regular routine nabs you a nice little prize?

I’ve always been a purist in these competitions. My miles are usually road miles. A mix of running and walking. Usually, an 80/20 break is in favor of running. However, as the competition continues, I get consistently one-upped by a coworker who only does her miles on an elliptical. As long as I don’t pay attention, I think, “Good for her. At least she’s staying active!”

But then the Canadian wildfire smoke happened a week or two ago, and I was forced to do a few of my miles on the elliptical. And because elliptical miles are fraud miles (in my opinion), I did more “distance” in the same amount of time my usual run would take. I also noticed that because I ended the week with more miles than usual, my coworker pulled out an extra few miles last minutes to push herself over the top.

Suddenly, I thought, “Katie Ann, you’re setting her pace.” Because, of course, that’s how competitions work. You try to do just enough to beat all the others, right?

So the evil, slightly sadistic, uber-competitive side of me slammed into overdrive. Initially, I just wanted to beat her, except that would be impossible doing road miles only; I’m not an ultra runner. BUT… I do have an elliptical. In my house. So… how far could I push her?

I was going to find out. I added a bunch of machine miles on top of my run/walks, and by Sunday night, I discovered something else. My coworker wasn’t always above board when posting her miles. Sometimes (especially on the last day of the week), she would hold her posts back until 9:30pm. Unless you relish staying up until midnight to beat the 7 miles she ran at 6am, you were kind of screwed.

I went into Hyperdrive. “Even if I don’t beat you this week, I will make your legs fall off.” My goal was to make her feel the burn, to have her be the one up at midnight on the last day sweating over her elliptical.

I figured it wouldn’t be too hard. I am a distance runner. I love to spend interminable periods doing strenuous things. I enjoy running hills. I’ve been exercising since I was 14 or 15 years old. I like the burn, and I love being sore. I can go longer and harder than most people I know, and I probably could keep the pace that high until the end of the competition (especially on an elliptical), but this seemed like a lot of time spent for too little reward. I would settle for seeing how far I could push in this week.

I started off slow, testing to see if I was her pacesetter. By Thursday, she was, on average, about 5 to 7 miles behind me at the end of every day. She snapped the bait and did her typical workout in the morning and another round in the evening that day. I was maybe a little too pumped for her reaction. The next day I did 3 sessions and 18 “miles” to get back in front. If I could beat her, that would be great, but primarily the goal was to make her “run” from my shadow for the rest of the month.

A strange thing happened while I was doing all this, though. I don’t like myself much when I’m competitive because I know I’m a jerk. I watched my mileage leapfrog above 65 miles, and it felt obscene. They didn’t feel like honest miles. By my watch step count, one elliptical mile equaled roughly half of a road mile (although I understand elliptical strides are designed differently than normal running strides). There were no hills, no sunrises— just buckets and buckets of sweat collecting in my sneakers and squishing between my toes. All this for a number that made me blush. Still, I wanted to make my point. My coworker was playing a game, and the game would play back for this one week.

We continued for the rest of the week, and some things kept bugging me. 1.) I was being a jerk— purposefully playing around with someone because I could. 2.) I was making miles that embarrassed me because I knew they weren’t true. 3.) I was spending a lot of time on something I told those closest to me I wouldn’t spend a lot of time on.

Competition can bring out the best in some, the killer in others, and the schemer in even more. I looked at my coworker beating all of us road milers and thought, how can I make your miles more difficult? She looked at my miles and said how can I do enough to beat her? The answer ended after 80+ “miles” at 10:40pm on Sunday night when I went to sleep thinking, “Let’s see if she beats 14.5 miles.”

She did. Barely. But she did it.

I predicted she would. I had hoped she would at the beginning. I had wanted to make sure she earned her “miles” with her legs rather than her cunning, but it was a small prize.

Running 8 miles to my sister’s house didn’t feel this way, gaining over 500 feet in elevation on the last mile. That felt like a fete. An accomplishment. This didn’t feel that way at all. I had no idea if my coworker got what I was putting down. If she was calling me a capital B witch under her breath, I certainly didn’t have much defense— and so what if she ran the next two weeks terrified she’d have to do another midnight run to the wire?

Showing someone it can be done and doing it are two different things. Sometimes the real power is knowing when to stop playing the game. The lesson here was that there are reasons we put limits on ourselves, and there are real consequences when we cross those lines. It’s okay to lose a competition if winning it means sacrificing your integrity.