Strava would allow you to follow people. You could see how fast, how far, how etc. of his/her runs. It’s kinda Facebook for amateur athletes. Obviously once and while you would be tempted to compare your run to other. You wonder how come those people you know cold run that fast, that far, that etc. ? You would question how high his/her heart rate be? If he/she is of your age you would shake your head and judge them violating that maximum BPM rule.
To compare with other seems like our natural instinct. Evolutionarily this might be beneficial to human kind as we would need to compete for limited resources to survive. The drive to be numero uno is universal.
But of course we all are different. Even siblings are different to each other. Genetically, emotionally, socially, economically etc. We have different goals, family conditions, interests etc. Hence to compare our performance to other we almost always ignore these factors.
Some could run faster because they have been trained for a number of years, some are younger, other could simply had a good sleep and a full day rest. To compare snap shots is not doing us a good data comparison.
But we all know that this is not comparing numbers. We just want to be seen to be great. We treat other people as mirrors to see ourselves. Like Narcissus we want to see our greatness by comparing our numbers with others.
There are good reasons to compare ourselves to others. We could try to improve our runs by learning from our peers but the motivation is not to be viewed as superior to others but mostly to achieve our better selves.
We all have dormant potentials that would remain hidden unless we push ourselves to achieve it. But this certainly not to say that we should all achieve the same peaks. That might work for professional athletes but I would argue never for amateurs.
So next time you check other people’s numbers understand that there are reasons for them to be abe achieve those and that you could learn from them how to achieve your hidden dormant potential.
You could be second or 1000th place. That is OK so long as your first in pursuing to achieve your own peak potential
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