Born to compete? Just compulsive? Or a little of both?

Are lifelong competitors born to strive or is driving yourself a learned behavior?

“I think it’s both,” says Head Coach Milton Williams of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock track and cross country teams. “You see a lot of guys, they competed in college and it never got out of their blood. They’re lifers. They run as long as they can keep running. But also a lot of times there’s guys that never competed in college and they kind of get a late urge to compete and do things. …

“The ones that tend to be really elite are probably the ones that did it in college and were really good at it. They just don’t want to give it up. They keep going. They’re the ones that run really unbelievable times in their 50s and 60s.”

Ross Bolding ran track in high school in Dermott and at college in Monticello. At age 67, he’s still training “to be better.”

“My daddy taught me as a child to be competitive,” he says. “Daddy would play dominoes and checkers with us children. Mother would slip around and say, ‘Let him win, let him win.’ And Daddy would say, ‘Heck no, I’m not letting him win. If he ever beats me he’ll know he earned it.’ And of course I never beat him because my daddy was a genius mathematically and you couldn’t beat him at anything that had numbers in it.

“But I tried and got beat down and got up and tried again and got beat down and got up until I learned you don’t give up.”

Bolding’s friend James Bresette, 52, was a U.S. Marine in his 20s and only ran as much as he had to. He took up road racing in his 30s. He works to improve his speed; he strives. “If a person wasn’t born with [that ambition] they had to have developed it at a very young age,” he says, “and then build upon it, succeed at it at a very young age. Something like that you have to develop.”

David Williams, 63, of Little Rock, is a relentless racer. He will suffer to avoid being outpaced. “You beat David Williams, you know you have arrived early and stayed late,” Bolding says. So where does Williams think he gets that drive?

“My parents were both good athletes when they were in high school, but they didn’t participate in sports afterward,” he says, “and both of them were pretty sedentary. Neither one of them were the type of parents that would come to high school events and, you know, scream and yell. Nor would they do anything extra to motivate us. And all my brothers and sisters, we’re all the same way, we’re all highly competitive. So I don’t know where it comes from. It’s got to be something that ….

“I think it’s something that you’re born with, but then at some point in time you kind of see it and develop it. It may be in high school, it may be later on. You find that out about yourself and then you start polishing it, and working on it, and refining it and seeing how far you can go with it.”

You make striving part of you.

What strivers discover in themselves, he suggests, is that they are naturally gifted at whatever sport they pick. If that sport is running, possibly - possibly - they have a bit of a compulsive personality, because so many runners are “driven to train, and train through injury. We’re like the postman: rain, snow, sleet, we’re out there training.”

And then finally, he says, comes a readiness to suffer. “There’s a great deal of discomfort that comes with racing at a high level, whatever that level might be. It’s the same for the winners of the New York Marathon as it is for the people who win the Hope Watermelon 5K. That suffering is the same for all of them no matter what their talent level is.”

Jacob Chism, 18, runs for Monticello High School. He says he’s willing to suffer because he has learned that it makes him stronger.

“I try to push myself past the edge in practice from time to time to see how much I can take, like if we have a big meet, a week or two before I try to push myself over the limit to see how far I can go.” He has heard that three weeks after a real push, if you sleep and eat well, the body adapts to make you better.

“The sleeping well - that part’s the hard part,” he says.

ActiveStyle, Pages 28 on 04/01/2013

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