For most of my adult life, I identified myself as “not a competitive person.” I was a nice, thoughtful, collaborative, easy going person. Competitive people, I thought, were aggressive, confrontational people who would throw you under the bus and do anything to get ahead. That definitely wasn’t me. I wore the “not a competitive person” label with pride.

And yet, somehow I fell in love with wheel to wheel racing, a sport that involves battling door to door with other cars for the same scrap of asphalt. Racing is arguably one of the most competitive things a person could do. How did that happen? It turns out I was a competitive person all along, but being competitive didn’t mean quite what I thought it did.

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