Competitive Spirit

I recently discovered that one of my coworkers is a runner. He works in a different department which means that we don’t have the opportunity to interact all that often but he mentioned in passing that he couldn’t afford to miss another run, which is totally something I would do to let others know that I’m better than them a runner. We talked about running for a few minutes, what races we were doing and how much we hate all the wind we’ve been having lately. It felt a little like we were sizing each other up, two fighters standing eye to eye at the pre-fight weigh in. In the interest of congeniality neither one of us mentioned any PRs or goals for our upcoming races and neither one of us asked. It was as though there was some kind of unwritten don’t ask, don’t tell policy. I desperately wanted to know who was faster but I didn’t want to appear too competitive, although that may have gone out the window when I stood inches from his face and stared him down. I also didn’t want to ask him his 10K PR and have him say “36:22, what’s yours?” because that’s when the lying starts.

Enter Athlinks. If you’re not familiar with Athlinks it is a wonderful resource. As far as I can tell Athlinks goes about gathering up as many online results as they can find for races (running, biking, triathlon etc.) and then they put them all into a searchable database. If you’re a member you can even track your friends and rivals. So I went to Athlinks and searched for this guy’s race results. Turns out we’ve run two of the same races, last year’s Bolder Boulder and last year’s Georgetown Half Marathon. Can you guess who won both of those races? (Hint: Do you think I’d be posting about it if I lost?) I beat him by 6 minutes in Boulder and 7+ in Georgetown. POW! Take that, coworker I barely know! Next time I see him I’m going to ask him about his race results. Then when he tells me I’ll be all condescending and sympathetic, I’ll tilt my head and be like “Aww, that’s OK. That’s still a good accomplishment, you should still be proud of those times,” because that’s also something I would totally do to let others know that I’m better than them.

So next time you run into someone who tells you that a long time ago they once ran a marathon in under 3 hours go to Athlinks and find out if they are lying. I use it all the time now, so don’t even bother trying to tell me that you ran a 19 minute 5K when I can clearly see that it was 19:14 you lying sack of crap.

Incidentally Athlinks is not paying me to write this but they should be, that’s the 3rd time I’ve linked to them in this post. Plus, I’ve come up with some cool new slogans that they can use:

Athlinks, the great new lie detector.
Athlinks, helping you put coworkers in their place since 2005.

Whichever one they choose it will certainly be better than their current one which is Compete. Connect. Ha! More like Lame. Boring. Am I right? It doesn’t even start with the name Athlinks (4th time!), it’s like they know nothing about branding. It doesn’t even convey that you can catch people in their lies! Madness.