http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/blogs/world-of-sport/article/24985/ Never in my 15+ years of studying, using, and working with English have I seen courage have such a meaning. What am I missing here? Shouldn't persistence or tenacity or something similar be here?
By the official definition, eh: She was courageous in that she faced difficulty, pain, blah blah instead of giving up. Tenacity would be the best word here imo.
I would say she faced it when she signed up. So she had courage to decide to attend the event. Primarily I would say courage is related to future events because you're brave enough to take on the challenge. During an event courage is only applicable if you have something to lose (you can have courage to stay in a sword fight). But you can't have courage to keep on doing something that, although exhausting and painful, incurs no loss if you fail. To be clear, you do not lose anything by losing a race - you just don't win. If you consider that a loss then you were either hoping too much for or took your success for granted.
And that's the difference between over-competitive and under-competitive people. I never used the middle-ground word "competitive" because depending on which side I used it on, the other side might rage.
Again, you can't lose something you don't already have when you're talking about courage. Note the meanings of lose and their Hungarian equivalents: 1. Elveszíteni: lose a race or (rarely) an item of your possession (wallet, dignity) 2. Elhagyni: lose an item of possession or leave (a building) 1 cannot be used in the same context as courage while 2 can. Even though the 'lose' in the article is clearly in the meaning of 1. Because e.g. in a sword fight you can lose your life or dignity, etc. and you can have the courage to stay in it nonetheless. But in a sports competition (even though self-respect and other abstract things are at stake) you can't have courage since that refers to situations of bigger gravity. I suppose the tl;dr version is that the distinction between competition and fight has to be made, and only in a fight can courage factor in (when we're considering the interval during the event since I mentioned above that courage does play a role before a competition, for example at the sign-ups).
