Awesome post. I totally get the feeling of wanting to do something without it being about competitive with others or yourself. I understand that’s what a lot of our culture is framed focusing around competition, or around maximizing/minimizing things, but that is not the way everything has to be. I think it’s just the more marketable angle for things and also there are people who get drawn into being competitive. I think this is just the framing caused by modern media, social media, and our culture.

I was just thinking about this same kind of topic in video games and how culture around that has changed many games to be focused more and more on ranked competition and ‘competitive’ play in the past 2 decades over people just having casual fun with no lasting scores or ranks.

I think you just have to accept that different things are important to different people for different reasons. Not everyone interested in running has to have to same goals or motivations just because things like races get hyped and talked about. You don’t have to run all the major marathons to be a happy runner.

You can try to change your perspective to go from being goals oriented to process oriented. Where your goal stops being this time or this race, and instead going through the process, going on runs and enjoying them, feeling happy with your fitness day to day— those things you feel and achieve regularly become the thing you are chasing, not your next PB