based takes! was just laughing with a friend of mine about how "athleisure" as a style has become completely untethered from actually being athletic, just pure signaling in many cases. Also maybe a broader philosophical point, but I come away from this feeling like we lose a lot as a culture by not allowing people to "lose." That's where all the growth & magic happens in a person's life. No bueno.
When 70% of the population is overweight or obese, when the majority of healthcare costs are due to lifestyle diseases, and these healthcare costs are placing a tax and personal burden on people who themselves are living better lifestyles, I find it hard to give a shit about what is or isn't a "real" athlete.
It's like being in a country where 70% of people are illiterate and arguing about what a "real" intellectual is.
I never comment on substack posts, but this one is just absolutely silly? I can think of multiple reasons that this is just completely and utterly wrong: 1) being wrong factually about the state of competition in the US 2)Having no clue what athletic excellence entails 3) Completely missing the emergent virtues of competition and 4) (Most minorly) not understanding the point of expensive leisure wear.
For the first point, We have sufficient competitive athletic spaces in the U.S. - it's a whole meme on the traditionalist right about how travel ball competes with going to church on Sunday.
By what measure are competitive athletic spaces decreasing? College athletics are currently experiencing something of a renaissance, and professionalization of athletes (college or otherwise) is accelerating (MLS expansion, WNBA expansion, just on the top of my head). The institutions of competition are increasing (I would bet there are more kids playing youth soccer and more girls playing basketball than there were 10 years ago), while (I think) the number of kids participating in recreational sports is down (likely because of increased pay-to-play leagues at the youth level).
For the second point, I'd ask: Do you know what they call adult sports leagues that care a lot about competition? ...Professional sports leagues! We live in a society of comparative advantage. The best athletes way early on are sorted out and set up to compete. You're mad at the people who could never be excellent (and if you think they are, you don't appreciate how crazy athletic even the benchwarmers of pro leagues are).
Everybody else by definition can't really be excellent. If they were excellent, they'd be those aforementioned professionals. There's strong genetic component that contributes to athletic excellence. When I was a kid, I played football for 7 years (3rd grade-9th grade). I played offensive line, and I was actually really good at it. The puberty hit and I lost weight, and you can't block 6-3 275 lb defensive linemen if you are 5 '8 165 pounds. You coach won't even give you practice time if he has 5 guys who better fit the OL mold. No amount of time in the gym, working on fundamentals and foot work, blocking, etc would have made me good at the high school level, let alone in the NFL.
So I pivoted sports and ran cross country/track...and was still super unathletic relative to the average cross country runner. I have a funny memory of running a 100m race with a shot-putter when I was in high school. I ran 5+ miles a day, for over a year. He didn't. He was faster than me! And when my own personal progression eventually hit a wall, I quit, because what's the point? I was getting beat by people who were younger than me. I was bigger than the other XC runners (somehow gained 30 pounds running), and was never going to be good. But with doing that, my health definitely declined.
Third, when talking about the virtues of competition, I have to again bring up my own experience. Only in the last 2 years (well over a decade after high school) did I pick up running again, almost certainly becoming one of the people you disparage here. I don't race. I don't care about times. I run because it feels good and I've seen a noticeable improvement in my health since doing so. There's literally nothing like running 6 miles in <45 degree weather, completing that last miles and pushing it hard when you're exhausted. Because there's also a life lesson in that! Sometimes in life you will be exhausted. You will want to quit or take a breather, but someone will be need you to keep for their sake. Athletics, whether it be team/individual or competitive/recreational, function best when they instill virtues like commitment and accountability. When our athletics philosophy focus just on competition and winning, we create shitty people. My high school football team didn't really have that philosophy; lots of athletes were better than me, any many got college offers, but dropped out pretty early and aren't doing anything good with their lives now. Maybe if we cared more about using athletics to build better people instead of just winning, they'd be doing better.
And lastly, I'm one of those folks who wear $125 shoes...because they have a noticeable improvement in my comfort and ability to running - I haven't had plantar fasciitis since I got these shoes. I have a $160 sports watch (cheaper than a smart watch) and it was easily the best investment I made too, between GPS, autosyncing my health stats so I know how hard I'm pushing. You can dunk on sportswear all you want, and I hate that lots of it is overpriced, but there's a reason amateurs wear it - it's functionally better than the alternatives, and keeps us doing it.
This is a great piece but I have mixed feelings on the need to make sports competitive in order for them to be fulfilling. I played competitive tennis for most of my life and when it didn’t work out in my favour (playing D1, making national teams), it took a long time for me to find joy in the sport again.
Only until recently did I find the love and joy that came from tennis that I had as a kid before it got serious. I think especially when it comes to how much investment and time it takes to be deemed good to be competitive, I don’t think it’s terrible for there to be recreational spaces that encourage movement and foster community. Also the costs of being competitive simply may not be attainable for some. Wanna play USTA tennis? Open your wallets and be ready to shell out close to $10K for lessons, tournament fees, travel expenses, and more. Wanna hit all six stars for marathon majors? Each marathon could cost you up to a months rent and that’s before you even hit the starting line. These are two examples but when I talk to friends who want to challenge themselves, cost comes up as the biggest barrier to achieving competitiveness.
I think there are opportunities to make sports exciting and competitive but when the barrier to entry is so high, it makes it difficult for people to enjoy the fun that comes with winning!
(1) I think recreational spaces that encourage movement and community are great - this whole piece is just an argument for more competitive spaces! Both can co-exist, I just think sports have lost a lot of the latter in favor of the former.
(2) I don't think $$ should be a consideration at all. There are ways to compete that are completely free - this isn't an arguement for people to shell out money so they can compete in a tennis league or a marathon, it's about the fact that people are playing sports with no attachment to the outcome (which is the essence of sports in my opinion). There really is not much of a barrier to entry to compete in things like running (but I understand there is for tennis)
LOVE IT. As a former competitive athlete, my observation of running clubs is most people are just seeking community and trying to make friends/partners in a healthy medium. The demise of the 3rd space and social media ruining IRL interactions have led to these things popping up everywhere. Net positive at the end.
the softening culture with competition is getting scary man, it's discouraging future winners
most of these things like run clubs have turned into 'social with a side of sport'...nothing wrong with it + actually defo should be encouraged vs online social
but competition elsewhere needs to come back and respected, maybe we gotta bring back bullying
I compete regularly in motorcycle racing, a few BMX evenings a year, I've raced mountain bike events and cyclocross events and I do a lot of running events now so I'm an outlier. I don't think I know anyone personally that signs up for as many races but...in the world of running most of us are competing with ourselves. Strava has been great for that I can track my improvement against myself. Even when I race my motorcycles and often get a little trophy for a top 3 finish I'm most excited when I break one of my own lap records.
Should I have to run a specific speed or distance before I'm allowed to buy expensive shoes?
Like, fuck, because some people who exercise aren’t being competitive competition is dying? That’s… so fucking absurd. Like is this bait, are you trolling? You can’t actually be for real.
American Capitalism unfortunately has taken many good things and turned them into entirely consumer products. Anything that once was or could be something cultural is fed into our consumerism. Hence you get "athletic" culture that really is just a collection of consumer products.
I love the premise of this article — the yearning for a revival of the true spirit of athleticism and competitiveness (and social criticism on status-driven, showy, pseudo activities, and maybe bad tastes in fashion). I'm a firm believer that fierce competition creates peak human beings, and the experience of conquering, winning, and defeating oneself and others is transcendent.
I was raised in a society where school sports were about conformity performance. It was always a group activity: we were asked to run in a squad at an even pace, no matter how fast we could run individually. We were told to stick with the class's mediocrity.
I never had a system or environment for competitive sports, nor an incentive to love them (it's something I secretly feel bad for my younger self about). After I moved to the States, I truly fell in love with sports — snowboarding, hiking, kayaking, mountain biking. I experienced the most euphoria when snowboarding in deep mountains, where I felt I had established a unique bond with nature. I still see myself doing some competitive sports in the future if I have time and resource to train.
"We are doing a massive disservice to athletics, not in making it too inclusive, but in pretending that participation and competition are the same thing."
I am middle aged and when I was a teenager, recreational athletic competition was a nearly daily occurrence.
My friends and I would pay basketball at school during lunch break or football on the grass. Good luck trying that in today's world. For both of my children's middle school and high school experience, during lunch time students were relegated to staying indoors in a cafeteria. And I wonder if someone tried to play football on the grass at their schools, whether upon sight of the first tackle being made one or more would be arrested for battery and assault on school grounds.
Each game of basketball or football among friends or peers was a competition. Yes we had fun, but at the same time a score was always kept so there was always a winner and a loser.
It wasn't just at school because after school on weekdays or weekends my friends and I would meet at local parks and again play basketball or football with a score always kept irrespective if the opposition was a team of our friends or total strangers.
Neither myself nor my friends were special athletes. None of us were gifted enough to make it to the roster of our high school teams. We were the nerds who cared mostly about getting good grades in Calculus, English, Physiology, and all of our classes. We couldn't compete with the jocks on the official teams but we held our own on the playgrounds and parks.
For decades I had not participated in a competition until a few weeks ago. I have picked up the game of tennis and my skill is progressing as one might expect for a person picking up a new sport when they are in their fifties. Which is to say slowly and poorly.
I have somewhat enjoyed the past couple of years of private lessons and weekly tennis clinics with a group of similarly aged and similarly skilled men, the latter of which provides only the most cursory element of competition in the form of mini-games in our clinic. They are the sort of games made to allow for quick switching out of a team of two rotating through a group of six to eight men.
A few weeks ago I played in an actual competitive tennis match paired up with another person from my tennis group against two other men.
I performed poorly and we were trounced in our two set match.
There was no audience to speak of other than a stray person or two who might have been related to one of the opposing team members. But I felt that loss and my performance was a loss made public to the world.
Because of that loss I find myself interested and dedicated to improving my game with a steadfastness I've never felt towards tennis. I am more enthusiastic about tennis than I have ever been in the years since I started playing.
The sting of defeat in competition might be the best reminder we have of the futility of our current methods. Perhaps only defeat can force us to recalibrate our methodology and remind us to return to first principles. (I now tell my tennis coach: Let's take it to the start. Pretend I am 9 years old and you are teaching me how to swing a racket.). The sting of defeat hurts, but only after a decades long hiatus when I was reintroduced to that sting did I recognize it is preferable to the complacency of participation trophy culture.
based takes! was just laughing with a friend of mine about how "athleisure" as a style has become completely untethered from actually being athletic, just pure signaling in many cases. Also maybe a broader philosophical point, but I come away from this feeling like we lose a lot as a culture by not allowing people to "lose." That's where all the growth & magic happens in a person's life. No bueno.
You can only lose if you compete! This is an argument for making things more competitive not punishing or discouraging people for losing!
BASED
When 70% of the population is overweight or obese, when the majority of healthcare costs are due to lifestyle diseases, and these healthcare costs are placing a tax and personal burden on people who themselves are living better lifestyles, I find it hard to give a shit about what is or isn't a "real" athlete.
It's like being in a country where 70% of people are illiterate and arguing about what a "real" intellectual is.
I never comment on substack posts, but this one is just absolutely silly? I can think of multiple reasons that this is just completely and utterly wrong: 1) being wrong factually about the state of competition in the US 2)Having no clue what athletic excellence entails 3) Completely missing the emergent virtues of competition and 4) (Most minorly) not understanding the point of expensive leisure wear.
For the first point, We have sufficient competitive athletic spaces in the U.S. - it's a whole meme on the traditionalist right about how travel ball competes with going to church on Sunday.
By what measure are competitive athletic spaces decreasing? College athletics are currently experiencing something of a renaissance, and professionalization of athletes (college or otherwise) is accelerating (MLS expansion, WNBA expansion, just on the top of my head). The institutions of competition are increasing (I would bet there are more kids playing youth soccer and more girls playing basketball than there were 10 years ago), while (I think) the number of kids participating in recreational sports is down (likely because of increased pay-to-play leagues at the youth level).
For the second point, I'd ask: Do you know what they call adult sports leagues that care a lot about competition? ...Professional sports leagues! We live in a society of comparative advantage. The best athletes way early on are sorted out and set up to compete. You're mad at the people who could never be excellent (and if you think they are, you don't appreciate how crazy athletic even the benchwarmers of pro leagues are).
Everybody else by definition can't really be excellent. If they were excellent, they'd be those aforementioned professionals. There's strong genetic component that contributes to athletic excellence. When I was a kid, I played football for 7 years (3rd grade-9th grade). I played offensive line, and I was actually really good at it. The puberty hit and I lost weight, and you can't block 6-3 275 lb defensive linemen if you are 5 '8 165 pounds. You coach won't even give you practice time if he has 5 guys who better fit the OL mold. No amount of time in the gym, working on fundamentals and foot work, blocking, etc would have made me good at the high school level, let alone in the NFL.
So I pivoted sports and ran cross country/track...and was still super unathletic relative to the average cross country runner. I have a funny memory of running a 100m race with a shot-putter when I was in high school. I ran 5+ miles a day, for over a year. He didn't. He was faster than me! And when my own personal progression eventually hit a wall, I quit, because what's the point? I was getting beat by people who were younger than me. I was bigger than the other XC runners (somehow gained 30 pounds running), and was never going to be good. But with doing that, my health definitely declined.
Third, when talking about the virtues of competition, I have to again bring up my own experience. Only in the last 2 years (well over a decade after high school) did I pick up running again, almost certainly becoming one of the people you disparage here. I don't race. I don't care about times. I run because it feels good and I've seen a noticeable improvement in my health since doing so. There's literally nothing like running 6 miles in <45 degree weather, completing that last miles and pushing it hard when you're exhausted. Because there's also a life lesson in that! Sometimes in life you will be exhausted. You will want to quit or take a breather, but someone will be need you to keep for their sake. Athletics, whether it be team/individual or competitive/recreational, function best when they instill virtues like commitment and accountability. When our athletics philosophy focus just on competition and winning, we create shitty people. My high school football team didn't really have that philosophy; lots of athletes were better than me, any many got college offers, but dropped out pretty early and aren't doing anything good with their lives now. Maybe if we cared more about using athletics to build better people instead of just winning, they'd be doing better.
And lastly, I'm one of those folks who wear $125 shoes...because they have a noticeable improvement in my comfort and ability to running - I haven't had plantar fasciitis since I got these shoes. I have a $160 sports watch (cheaper than a smart watch) and it was easily the best investment I made too, between GPS, autosyncing my health stats so I know how hard I'm pushing. You can dunk on sportswear all you want, and I hate that lots of it is overpriced, but there's a reason amateurs wear it - it's functionally better than the alternatives, and keeps us doing it.
This is a great piece but I have mixed feelings on the need to make sports competitive in order for them to be fulfilling. I played competitive tennis for most of my life and when it didn’t work out in my favour (playing D1, making national teams), it took a long time for me to find joy in the sport again.
Only until recently did I find the love and joy that came from tennis that I had as a kid before it got serious. I think especially when it comes to how much investment and time it takes to be deemed good to be competitive, I don’t think it’s terrible for there to be recreational spaces that encourage movement and foster community. Also the costs of being competitive simply may not be attainable for some. Wanna play USTA tennis? Open your wallets and be ready to shell out close to $10K for lessons, tournament fees, travel expenses, and more. Wanna hit all six stars for marathon majors? Each marathon could cost you up to a months rent and that’s before you even hit the starting line. These are two examples but when I talk to friends who want to challenge themselves, cost comes up as the biggest barrier to achieving competitiveness.
I think there are opportunities to make sports exciting and competitive but when the barrier to entry is so high, it makes it difficult for people to enjoy the fun that comes with winning!
Abena! thanks for reading and for your comment!
(1) I think recreational spaces that encourage movement and community are great - this whole piece is just an argument for more competitive spaces! Both can co-exist, I just think sports have lost a lot of the latter in favor of the former.
(2) I don't think $$ should be a consideration at all. There are ways to compete that are completely free - this isn't an arguement for people to shell out money so they can compete in a tennis league or a marathon, it's about the fact that people are playing sports with no attachment to the outcome (which is the essence of sports in my opinion). There really is not much of a barrier to entry to compete in things like running (but I understand there is for tennis)
LOVE IT. As a former competitive athlete, my observation of running clubs is most people are just seeking community and trying to make friends/partners in a healthy medium. The demise of the 3rd space and social media ruining IRL interactions have led to these things popping up everywhere. Net positive at the end.
the softening culture with competition is getting scary man, it's discouraging future winners
most of these things like run clubs have turned into 'social with a side of sport'...nothing wrong with it + actually defo should be encouraged vs online social
but competition elsewhere needs to come back and respected, maybe we gotta bring back bullying
I compete regularly in motorcycle racing, a few BMX evenings a year, I've raced mountain bike events and cyclocross events and I do a lot of running events now so I'm an outlier. I don't think I know anyone personally that signs up for as many races but...in the world of running most of us are competing with ourselves. Strava has been great for that I can track my improvement against myself. Even when I race my motorcycles and often get a little trophy for a top 3 finish I'm most excited when I break one of my own lap records.
Should I have to run a specific speed or distance before I'm allowed to buy expensive shoes?
You can apply this to the current state of art. Lowering the barrier to entry is all well and good until we stop critiquing things.
This is so fucking stupid my dude, say that shit at the average little league game.
You’re literally SO out of touch, was this your first time outside since Covid?
Like, fuck, because some people who exercise aren’t being competitive competition is dying? That’s… so fucking absurd. Like is this bait, are you trolling? You can’t actually be for real.
American Capitalism unfortunately has taken many good things and turned them into entirely consumer products. Anything that once was or could be something cultural is fed into our consumerism. Hence you get "athletic" culture that really is just a collection of consumer products.
I love the premise of this article — the yearning for a revival of the true spirit of athleticism and competitiveness (and social criticism on status-driven, showy, pseudo activities, and maybe bad tastes in fashion). I'm a firm believer that fierce competition creates peak human beings, and the experience of conquering, winning, and defeating oneself and others is transcendent.
I was raised in a society where school sports were about conformity performance. It was always a group activity: we were asked to run in a squad at an even pace, no matter how fast we could run individually. We were told to stick with the class's mediocrity.
I never had a system or environment for competitive sports, nor an incentive to love them (it's something I secretly feel bad for my younger self about). After I moved to the States, I truly fell in love with sports — snowboarding, hiking, kayaking, mountain biking. I experienced the most euphoria when snowboarding in deep mountains, where I felt I had established a unique bond with nature. I still see myself doing some competitive sports in the future if I have time and resource to train.
"We are doing a massive disservice to athletics, not in making it too inclusive, but in pretending that participation and competition are the same thing."
I am middle aged and when I was a teenager, recreational athletic competition was a nearly daily occurrence.
My friends and I would pay basketball at school during lunch break or football on the grass. Good luck trying that in today's world. For both of my children's middle school and high school experience, during lunch time students were relegated to staying indoors in a cafeteria. And I wonder if someone tried to play football on the grass at their schools, whether upon sight of the first tackle being made one or more would be arrested for battery and assault on school grounds.
Each game of basketball or football among friends or peers was a competition. Yes we had fun, but at the same time a score was always kept so there was always a winner and a loser.
It wasn't just at school because after school on weekdays or weekends my friends and I would meet at local parks and again play basketball or football with a score always kept irrespective if the opposition was a team of our friends or total strangers.
Neither myself nor my friends were special athletes. None of us were gifted enough to make it to the roster of our high school teams. We were the nerds who cared mostly about getting good grades in Calculus, English, Physiology, and all of our classes. We couldn't compete with the jocks on the official teams but we held our own on the playgrounds and parks.
For decades I had not participated in a competition until a few weeks ago. I have picked up the game of tennis and my skill is progressing as one might expect for a person picking up a new sport when they are in their fifties. Which is to say slowly and poorly.
I have somewhat enjoyed the past couple of years of private lessons and weekly tennis clinics with a group of similarly aged and similarly skilled men, the latter of which provides only the most cursory element of competition in the form of mini-games in our clinic. They are the sort of games made to allow for quick switching out of a team of two rotating through a group of six to eight men.
A few weeks ago I played in an actual competitive tennis match paired up with another person from my tennis group against two other men.
I performed poorly and we were trounced in our two set match.
There was no audience to speak of other than a stray person or two who might have been related to one of the opposing team members. But I felt that loss and my performance was a loss made public to the world.
Because of that loss I find myself interested and dedicated to improving my game with a steadfastness I've never felt towards tennis. I am more enthusiastic about tennis than I have ever been in the years since I started playing.
The sting of defeat in competition might be the best reminder we have of the futility of our current methods. Perhaps only defeat can force us to recalibrate our methodology and remind us to return to first principles. (I now tell my tennis coach: Let's take it to the start. Pretend I am 9 years old and you are teaching me how to swing a racket.). The sting of defeat hurts, but only after a decades long hiatus when I was reintroduced to that sting did I recognize it is preferable to the complacency of participation trophy culture.