I’ve been a runner for upwards of ten years and asserted over and over that I am not a competitive person, even though I participate in several races a year. But in the last year, something small, but radical, has happened in my running. I started using “race” as a verb.

No longer content to run an event, I want to race it.

It happened through coaching and setting goals and training, and it—racing—is nowhere as terrifying a prospect as I once thought. When I was a girl, it always seemed to me that competition precluded friendship, and even though girls can be quite competitive in certain ways, many of us learn that we can’t be both nice and athletically competitive. Researchers who worked with girls in the 1980s and 90s found this time and again, and compared with boys, girls who play sports today express more interest in fairness and involving their friends than winning. Researchers in the late-1990s similarly found that women, in general, show less interest in competition than men, perhaps because their girlhood perceptions of competition as sparring for dominance persist into adulthood.

As women athletes, many of us seem to hold onto this group orientation, but it seems that it is not at the expense of competition—it is with a redefinition of what competition means. Along the same lines, newer research with girls supports the idea that girls do not strive any less than boys in sport; they just define competition differently. What a difference a decade makes: women and girls are changing the rules of sport.

What I’ve found in my research with female runners and in my own transition from “she who runs races” to “runner who races” is that female athletes have indeed renegotiated the rules of competition. Winning does not come at the cost of our friends, and we are just as likely to go out for margaritas with our race rivals as we are to want to outsprint them. The major significance of the cadres of the non-elite female runners is the ways we’ve found personal and social empowerment in the context of competitive sport. Most of the women I interviewed define this in terms of “competition with the clock,” yet those who race other runners say that the competition doesn’t mean someone loses. In essence, running invites us to be DIY competitors, whether your target is to win a race, achieve a time goal, or just reach the next mailbox on your street.

Through running, female athletes find an outlet for non-judgmental challenge among friends. Hugs—very sweaty ones—are common, and running groups find ways to be teams of both support and challenge, without aggressive adversaries other than those in our minds. The “power of the pack,” as one woman in my research calls it, drives us to run faster and stronger, and it pulls us along and propels those of us who pull ahead. Through the “power of the pack,” women’s running belies the false dichotomy of competition and support. As so many women who have run races will attest, when you see the finish line of a race, you’ll push harder to beat the closest runner—and then chat her up with congratulations on the other side of the line. We race with each other, as opposed to against one another, showing that tough competition and fierce support can coexist, and as women and athletes, we are better for it.

KRISTINA PINTO was an academic in gender and psychology and is now a mother, runner, and writer. She also blogs for the Competitor Group at Marathon Mama. This essay is an excerpt from her forthcoming book about how running enhances motherhood.

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