Knowing When to Quit. Setting ego aside to reach the next level.
What does it mean to quit? For the longest time, I associated quitting with ultimate failure. I’d feel guilty, shameful even, if I quit something I had committed to. I took pride in my ability to dig in when things got hard; my ego would swell, knowing others would mostly likely give up, but me, I would refuse to resign. Never quitting anything was my strategy for productivity and success – I worked in a lab for years in graduate school – not quitting earned me some breakthrough discoveries in my thesis research. This strategy worked even better when I started to race ultra marathons for a living – a sport whose success directly correlates to the amount of discomfort you can push through and to not stop running before you cross the finish line. Never quitting works really well - until it doesn’t, I’ve learned.
I’ll never forget the first time I learned to quit.
During the summer months in Colorado, I would routinely go on long training runs with friends up in the mountains. It was my favorite thing to do, and I had a solid group of ultra running friends to go with. On this particular day, a group of four of us, set out to do a cool loop in the high country – linking a few peaks above 14,000 feet. The weather was perfect - blue sky and sunny, a real treat in the backcountry. But once we started to climb in elevation, a storm rolled in. We all had the basic layers in our running packs – gloves, jacket, emergency blanket, a Garmin In Reach – we put on the layers and continued to climb. Snow kept piling up, quickly. The storm wasn’t letting up. I was getting increasingly cold and starting to doubt our choices, but no one else in the group seemed to want to turn around, so I kept going. A few minutes later one member of our group suddenly pulled off the trail at a junction. “We should cut the route short and take this lower trail,” he said. “I’m worried we’ll all be too exposed and cold if we continue up high.” He was the most experienced runner in the group – I trusted him. I scanned the faces of our group. The other two runners didn’t want to quit, they wanted to keep going. Me, I was torn, between my stubborn ‘no quit’ mentality and an eerie gut feeling I had to call it and take the lower trail. I told the group I wanted to quit, to go back a different way. The other two runners wanted to keep going. Unable to reach a group consensus, we decided to split up. The two runners who wanted to tag the summits and complete the ridge trudged on, ensuring regular check-ins and if things got really bad, that they’d bail. Once back at the car, I started to feel pains of guilt for not sticking it out, not doing the full loop. Had I lost my edge? Why had I quit? Was I not tough anymore? An hour later the other two runners showed up. Once I saw them, I knew immediately I had made the right decision to quit. Both runners got so cold in continuing their pursuit up the mountain, they both got mild frostbite on their toes and still to this day have permanent nerve damage.
Sometimes quitting is exactly what you need to do.
But quitting doesn’t always have to be a Capital ‘Q’ quit. I’ve learned lower case ‘q’ quitting can be extremely helpful and with that in mind, I quit all the time now. For instance, last week, I quit reading a book because I didn’t like it. I quit using dating apps because, well, it was just making me sad, and not working anyways. I quit my old coffee maker and just bought the one I wanted, because, what the heck, life is too short to drink bad coffee. I also routinely quit mountain runs if weather gets bad, or I don’t feel mentally sharp. I quit a track workout the other week when my calf started cramping up during the last interval - in doin so I avoided a more serious injury, and I was back to running, pain free, a few short days later.
But what does all this quitting mean? Does it mean I’m weak or a failure or not tough anymore? In fact, I think it’s the opposite. Knowing when to quit is a form of wisdom. It allows me to avoid mental and emotional burnout, short- and long-term injury. Finishing everything isn’t the key to success, it’s knowing when to push yourself to the next level, instead of pushing yourself over the edge. It’s knowing when to pause, and then pivot, instead of relentlessly pushing forward no matter the warning signs.
When’s the last time you quit something?
