Maybe You Should Just Quit
I used to powerlift as my main sport. I trained for 2-3 hours 4X a week, and I’d do 2 or 3 full meets per year. I did this for around 10 years. Recently I’ve changed gears completely, and I train for probably 45 minutes 3X a week. I haven’t done a meet in 4 years, and I may never do one again. I focus on training for, and playing basketball these days instead.
While transitioning from one to the other I’ve had to confront parts of my identity. Who I think I am as a person, and what my value is to myself and others. I’ve had to consider how I want to spend the hours of my life. It’s been a pretty big deal for me, and I’ve learned more about myself, not from the sports themselves, but from needing to change who I think I am as a person. It probably took me the better part of 3 years to realize I needed to quit powerlifting, or at least the way I was doing it.
I know a lot of people who hold on to a sport/goal/relationship/job because they feel like they should. It hasn’t been fun for a long time, and it’s long ago crossed the boundary from being a joy to becoming a burden. Here are a few lessons I learned in my own transition and I hope they’re helpful to you too. Maybe you should stick with it because it still brings you joy. That’s for you to decide. But I do have a few questions first, because like me, maybe you should just quit.
Are you doing it for yourself or others?
When I was powerlifting, I had a common thought around meet time. “If I fail I’m going to let so many people down.” I had told lots of people that I was doing a meet, and they all wanted me to do well. I owed it to them to come through! Failure is not an option! But what ended up happening is I was doing all the hard stuff, like top singles when my body hurt, and pushing through progressively more serious injuries, not because I wanted to, but because I thought others wanted this from me. Not a good place to be. It became a chore because I was trying to fulfill my perceived expectations of others. And the funny thing? They never really cared how I did at my meets anyway. If I failed, they would say, “Aw man that sucks you’ll get them next time”. I would be internally livid because they had no idea just how much work I put into my crappy performance. If I kicked ass they would say, “Aw man that’s awesome, good job.” And I would be livid to myself because they had no idea how much work went into my great performance. I noticed something as I’m sure you do too. I can’t win trying to impress others, because ultimately I’m the only one who really cares. And if I’m not enjoying doing all the hard stuff for a reward which is mine alone, why am I doing it again? The hours I was spending come from my life, so ultimately it’s up to me how I spend them, and no one is ever going to care about that quite as much as I do. This isn’t a bad thing at all, it was like escaping from jail and realizing that the cell door was never locked in the first place.
Life’s too short to read bad books
I love reading, so I’m always in a few books at a time. I used to trudge through a book even if I hated it because, I don’t want to be a quitter, you know? I can’t have book ADD, and never commit to anything, right? I was once slogging through something I didn’t enjoy, and shared this with someone I admire, another big reader. I presented it as a virtue. How stalwart I was in going back to reading something that sucked, over and over again. Gold star for me please! The Big Reader looked at me with a sigh and said, “Life’s too short for bad books.”
It hit me like a flick on the nose. They were right. There are an infinite amount of awesome things to read. Why was I wasting my life on something that wasn’t adding value, teaching me anything, and that I didn’t even enjoy? Now I quit on bad and boring books all the time, and embrace my tendency to jump around and take little sips of everything instead of drowning in one thing. I got something back that I never knew I lost. I enjoy reading again.
One of my strongest DL sets ever, 260kg for three and also the pit of darkness for me and my training. My facial expression is pretty indicative of my internal struggles.
When was the last time it was fun?
I asked my Dad once how he knew it was time to retire. His answer was simple, “5 bad days in a row. One bad day is normal, two you can live with, and three is a bad week. But after 5 bad days in a row, if you can, it’s time to hang it up.”
One bad workout is normal for sure, you can’t expect them all to be good. But even during the bad ones you should be able to think to yourself that you’d still rather not be doing something else. “I’d still rather be fishing” or so the bumper sticker goes. I got to a point in my own training where I wanted to be somewhere else, and not just sometimes, but all the time. Someone asked me when was the last time I enjoyed training, and I laughed because I honestly couldn’t remember. They asked, “If you don’t enjoy it, then why do you do it?” I stared off into space like a dummy realizing I didn’t really know.
What if you didn’t ever have to do it again?
Imagine flipping a coin. Heads you get to keep doing whatever your thing is. Tails you never get to do the thing again. Which one would you be rooting for? If you would feel a profound sense of relief that you never have to do the thing again, that’s a pretty clear answer. It’s hard to pull the trigger and make a big decision, and it’s easier to let the world decide for us. I had to pull out of a couple meets for injuries, and I noticed something embarrassing. I was glad I was injured and didn’t have to do the meet. I had to pause for a minute when I figured that out. How had I gotten so far down that path that I was glad to be injured?
If I quit, won’t that just make me a quitter?
This was the whole game for me. The reason I hung on so tightly and couldn’t do what, from the outside, was so obvious. I’m not a quitter. I teach people to stick to things for a living. Training and Nutrition are often frustrating and the only thing that keeps people going is stick-to-it-iveness. You have to exist in your body and it needs exercise and fuel. There is no getting out of it.
So how do I tell people with a straight face to stick it out, while I’m quitting like a crybaby quitting quitter who quits? Powerlifting had become important to who I thought I was as a person and that’s not something you can just give up, right? Quitting would mean the death of myself as I thought I was. Yet I never realized whether who-I-thought-I-was was actually who-I-wanted-to-be. Isn’t there a middle ground where I can lift weights for my health without making it a sport/obsession that I have come to…dare I say…hate?
A thunderous 360 dunk from the foul line
Fly Free Little Birdy
It took me years but I finally realized that I can lift for strength, and eat for health, without it consuming my entire life and becoming my only reason for being. I was just hiding behind powerlifting to give myself fake purpose, and worse still, doing it all for others instead of myself. I can lift weights for one hour instead of three and still get stronger. I can eat some pizza on weekends and have a beer and not be outside my weight class. Hey, I could have a meal without even needing to think about my weight class! And that wouldn’t make me a bad person, nor would I automatically go overboard and become obese. I had fallen for the all-or-nothing thinking that I was either white-knuckling it and doing EVERYTHING right, or I was a lazy slob who was going to die of heart disease at 40. I forgot just how much was in between, and how much of my internal struggle was of my own making, having nothing to do with the sports I was participating in at all.
I still needed to get to a point where I wasn’t just leaving one activity, I needed to be actively choosing to pursue something else. I needed to choose to have some more peace in my life, to have some free time, and to spend time with people I loved. Basketball just happened to be a great way for me to find that. I got to be a beginner again, and have the joy of learning something new. I got to suck at something and therefore improve quickly. I got to meet new people, make new friends, and have a way to spend time outside on a beautiful day.
It’s ok to be on the fence about your sport, your relationship, your job, your house or your life. I won’t be the one to tell you to stick it out or to drop it. There’s nothing magic about the activities themselves but everything to do with what they represent to us and whether they make your life better or worse. I hope you can ask yourself these questions above, and I hope you like the answers. And if, like me, you don’t like what you find, just know that there is so much joy in the world out there just waiting for you to march towards it.
