It's not a race in the classical sense: neither is there a need to be fastest, nor is there a finish line. (Nor a good way to measure ones position, for that matter).

I found that helping others helped very much in increasing my perl knowledge, as did writing code that actually solved problems for me.

I'll keep on learning new things about Perl, algorithms, data structures and idioms, and it'll be a long time until I'll feel confident with most corners of Perl 6.