Competition Without Animosity

The kind of competition that I tell about in my running stories is not serious; there is no animosity in it. For example, there was one girl with whom I was having this kind of joking competition during the half-marathon, and at around nine miles she was four or five metres ahead of me. At one point she started going straight ahead, following Ashrita and somebody else on the road crew who were running back to the car. She didn't see the long white mark on the road indicating the correct course. I screamed at her to make a left turn. So she came back to the course and was very happy that I had told her. Otherwise, she would have gone another two hundred metres out of her way. If I had really been competing with her, I would have kept silent and just tried to go as far ahead of her as possible.
 
-22 March 1981 
 
 

[Source: "Competition Without Animosity" in Sri Chinmoy,  Run and Become, Become and Run, Part 5, Agni Press/Aum Publications, Jamaica, New York, 1981.]