A lot is made these days (according to the posts on FB, LinkedIn, BusinessInsider, etc) about finding a mentor, finding someone older, established, settled and wiser to guide you through life’s labyrinth. I’m gong to propose something different: find a competitor.

In high school, I was a fairly clumsy, bony and awkward teenager. I’d been cut from more sports teams than I can count. But I could at least run and in my freshman year joined the track team because they took anyone and would just wait for you to quit on your own. I stayed because I discovered the long jump and from there the triple jump and with the encouragement of some kind upper classmen, got good enough to come within only a few points from getting the vaunted “letter” in track. The next year, a guy named Chuck joined the team, one year ahead of me, and after a not so stellar attempt at discus and javelin, wandered over to the jump pit and started jumping with me. And I was a little bit peeved because he was a little bit better than me and he never jumped before. So after everyone hit the showers, my pride in the soles of my shoes, I stayed and worked on my timing and footsteps. During that season, I learned to pay a grudging respect to Chuck and he to me, because one or both of us were constantly placing 1, 2 or 3 in the competitions with other schools. We competed in both events, long and triple, and while we were inconsistent in either event, we loved them both. At the end of the year, I earned my first letter in track (in any sport). So did Chuck. I wasn’t happy about that.

As my junior year rolled around I saw Chuck constantly in the halls and somehow we started to plot out what that springtime’s meet schedule would look like. When the football or basketball team would leave the weight rooms, we would go in afterward and work out. Outside by the track there was a roughed out hill that during the season the coaches would send us to run if we were caught goofing off. Chuck and I would run up and down that hill like crazy madmen, racing each other up and back down again. He was still just a little bit faster than me., but he was such a good guy, and funny as hell, that I couldn’t place exactly why I was upset and jealous of him.

By the time the season arrived in the spring, I took the track as a lean, toned, limber and fierce competitor, at that point maybe the best physical condition I’d ever been in; as was Chuck. And during the pre-season, the coach figured it out: Robin was just slightly better at long jump while Chuck was a bit better at triple jump. And that’s how he played us that season, because everywhere we went, we took 1st and 2nd place in each event against other schools in our league; we showed up at events and while marking our places at the pit, competitor’s were off to the side talking about us, they’d heard about us; when we jumped, we noticed they watched every move we made, stayed in the pit to watch us finish. The jump pits are typically ignored at track meets as spectators mostly gravitated to the finish lines for the sprints and races that were more charged with drama. Not this year: we now had crowds of spectators like gamblers at the craps table, oohing, cheering when they would hear your last foot smack the toe line before launching you into space in front of them. At one point, Chuck and I would watch the faces for each other and later on laugh about the grimaces of pain and frustration our competitors had when our last jump of the meet blew their best out of the sand. We made it all the way to the state finals that year, and while we did respectable, were knocked out mid-event by bigger, stronger, faster competitors. But at the end of year, we both earned another letter, sat with each other at the banquet and cheered loudly for each other when we went up to receive it.

Chuck forced me to be better than I could have been because he was my competitor first and then my friend.

Every since then, I was always grateful when someone stepped in to show me the ropes, guide me through a channel or open a door and I’ve been fortunate to have many of those. But I always searched for my competitor, the one who ran on the same track and was maybe one step faster. That’s the person who I learned the most from, even when, as it mostly is, they were never the wiser. I still do and they still don’t know. But thank you anyway.