Originally Posted by
wphamilton
Sometimes he is, sometimes not. Either way it doesn't matter, because you're not competing with him - you're competing against a goal which you set arbitrarily.
I do get your attitude. It could feel like it's demeaning to formal competition, actual wins that took talent and hard work to achieve, when someone refers to a casual chase as competitive. But you need to realize that no one is making that comparison. Maybe one rare guy, who has no idea what real competition is about or what it takes and has some Dunning-Kruger going on but that's not what anyone is talking about here. Literally no one is comparing a chase-down to an actual race.
And missing in this whole thread is the long-distance rider, which I'd say makes up the largest group of riders I see on a typical day. Even when we were kids, the goal was not to go faster than ever before but to go further. If I'm riding 20 or 50 or 100 miles, I don't want to burn out at Mile 5 because I was hell-bent on chasing some random guy ahead of me (who was riding at a comfortable pace for
his own 20, 50 or 100 mile ride). And if I DO catch and pass him, there's no telling if he's on Mile 1 or Mile 99 or whatever.