Winning and Running, or, Number Go Up!
In 2018, the World Cup briefly took over my life. My son had just been born 5 weeks premature, and I had long days in the NICU with nothing to do but watch TV on my computer. Before I knew it, I was completely invested in Harry Kane and England’s run through the tournament. I held Joey, who was barely five pounds, slept all the time, and drank formula by the milliliter, and watched game after game. Although England was my adopted team for the tournament, Joey and I had just as much fun learning about all the other teams and players, from Belgium to Ivory Coast to Japan, and, by the time Joey was home and England were bounced out of the semifinal, I decided I was now a soccer fan.
I wanted to keep that thrill I’d discovered watching the World Cup going, so I decided I was going to pick an English Premiere League team and get invested. To choose my team, I used an online quiz designed for Americans to find an EPL team that aligned with their attitude and values. The first suggestion it gave me was Arsenal, but I’m too big of a hipster contrarian to unironically root for one of the four or five big, name brand EPL teams. I therefore went with the second suggestion, Crystal Palace. I bought a shirt, I started arranging my Saturdays around their matches, I was in!
Two things jumped out to me early on in my Crystal Palace fandom. First, Crystal Palace were not very good. They weren’t terrible either, and they won enough games to stay out of the relegation zone. But they lost more than they won, often without scoring a goal. The second thing I learned was just how fierce my competitive drive was. I had arbitrarily selected this team based on a BS online quiz, but that was all it took for me to suddenly start yelling at the TV when they missed shots and to build up a pit of dread and anxiety in my stomach as hopeless games started running out of time. I checked the table all the time, did math in my head about how many points they would need to beat this team or that team, started carrying mental grudges against players from other teams who celebrated too much, the whole thing. Despite being a continent away and disconnected from my life in almost every way, Crystal Palace was making me miserable. After one season, I cut bait on the project and haven’t allowed myself to get invested in “football” since.
The same thing happened to me last year, during my first effort to create something on the internet. I find AI and its implications for teaching fascinating, and last fall I couldn’t understand why more of my colleagues at school weren’t interested in it, or only wanted to figure out how to catch kids using it to cheat. As an outlet, I started a YouTube channel where I made videos about AI in education, talking about ways I was using it in class, books I read on the topic, and the like. But within a few weeks of starting the channel, proving that I could build a thriving YouTube community became more interesting than the actual content of the videos. I started social media accounts to cross promote the videos, but to make that work I had to build up my number of followers on those sites. The game of accumulate subscribers, followers, and views replaced my initial genuine interest in discussing things I was interested in. I started to feel stressed about getting my videos made according to the schedule I had created in my head, and angry when they didn’t get the number of views I wanted. I started spending small amounts of money promoting videos and tiktok videos, at which point I started to feel like I was going to need to monetize my channel in order to earn the money back, which meant I needed to stress even more about it. By the time I quit the project and deleted all the content, I had completely given up on talking about AI in education and was only making videos in order to prove (to myself, since no one else cared) that I could.
I like to win, and when I do, the victory stops mattering and I just set a new goal for myself. I have to guard myself against that mode of thinking as much as possible, and differentiating my feelings about things that actually have real stakes or impact on me from things that only matter because I’ve made it a competition in my head between me and someone else. For example, the recent election did not go the way I wanted it to, and it left me feeling very anxious and depressed. Some of that feeling was fear about what might happen next in the country, but I have to be honest and say that a lot of that feeling was frustration that people I disagreed with now got to think they were right and I was wrong. I lost sleep over the fact that, somewhere out there in the world, Elon Musk and Hulk Hogan were feeling validated and smart, and that pissed me off. The fact that Steve Bannon was out there feeling like he’d backed the right horse made my angrier than any of the policies that he was likely to help see enacted. That’s not healthy.
I think this is why trail running is now my favorite type of racing. I’m 44 years old and a solid middle of the pack runner. No one, and I mean no one, will care about my 5K PR time, or where I finish in the men age 40-49 age group at a half marathon. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care, and it’s easy for me to make myself miserable if I run slower at a road race than I did on the same course last year, or if I was on pace for a PR and then fell apart in the last mile. But when I do trail races, that all goes away. The courses are so different, you can’t compare one to the next and even the same course is different year to year. Navigating the terrain is enough a challenge in the moment that I don’t have time to start doing math in my head about where I’m at pace-wise and how I’m falling short of my plan. When I do trail races, all I care about it finishing and feeling good about my effort. The goal is to find ways to make the other challenges in my life feel the same way.
I doing this fundraising project for what I believe to be very good reasons. I want to raise money for a meaningful cause. I want to create an opportunity for me to exercise, be out in nature, and process my negative feelings in a healthy way. I want to inspire other people to do the same—- I hope you, reader, get inspired by what I’m working on here and decide to do something yourself and start a project that has meaning and value for you. But already, I can feel that same need to make this successful for the sake of being successful. I’m looking at the number of new visits to this website. I refreshing the number of donations to the GoFundMe. I’m spending a lot of time thinking about what to put on Bluesky and TikTok to get my subscriber numbers up. But I also recognize it happening, so I’m going to take some deep breaths, calm down, and focus on the genuine meaning of the project. It’s easier said than done, but I’m going to hold myself accountable to it because I know if I let that competitiveness take over, I’ll stop enjoying what I’m doing, and before too long, I’ll quit.
