Your improvement remains valuable even if somebody else stays ahead.

Someone will always be ahead, and their position has no bearing on whether your improvement is real. The gains are yours regardless of the ranking, and they keep functioning in your life whether or not anyone ever notices them. Comparison changes how you feel about progress, not the progress itself.

When someone ahead of you makes your own gains feel worthless, look at the concrete evidence instead. What can you do now that you could not before? That answer does not move when other people do.