Quitting, Running, Kvetching, Enjoying, and the X-axis

I’ll never forget the way Anna, an old friend, characterized herself.

“I’m a quitter,” she said.

She was referring to the way she handled her long-distance running races. “All I do is complain the whole time. I want to quit from the halfway point to the end.”

She meant she was a big ole quitter after she successfully completed a fifty-mile race or longer.

It was humorous, but she wasn’t joking. She was highlighting her mental game, how it wasn’t spotless like she imagined it should be.

At the time, not having run too many ultras myself, I nodded at what she was saying. I, too, was a quitter. I kvetched for the last part of my long races — successfully completed — depending on the state of my glycogen stores.

I was succeeding at a tough endeavor yet complaining while doing so. Therefore, quitting.

Are you seeing the folly in this?

I’ve long kept this memory filed away, both because of its absurdity and its lesson. On the one hand, it assumes success is about spotlessness. On the other, it supposes what success is.

Recently, this has been coming up as a topic in my corner of the world. In a coaching group I’m part of, the question was posed — how do we support the client who feels progress isn’t being made quickly enough?

The majority of the responses pointed to how easy it is to not see progress as it’s being made. We often focus on the distance we haven’t covered yet. Or we forget the wins we’ve chalked up. Or we discount those wins a week after we pocketed them.

That pesky negativity bias of ours is the rockstar in all of this.

This bias keeps us on our toes. Achievement is hard, be it career advancement or getting to bed on time, so we goad ourselves as a kick in the butt.

However, it can thwart our ambitions, too. When we let it get out of control, it becomes necessary to explicitly mark our progress — no matter how small — and to keep our attention there, kicking the “I can’t, I didn’t, I should’ve, I’ll never” out the window. Scoot!

The confusion comes when we start to see the goading and the self-reproach as a sign we’re failing. It looks a lot like giving up because, to be fair, this is often the precursor to giving up — negative talk and futility.

We assume breaking or building habits should be easy and swift. It’s not. It takes time and repetition and re-grouping to get there. Do you want to know how it becomes easy to run fifty miles? Practice and wanting it, spread over time. The Y-axis is simply showing up and tolerating imperfections. The X-axis is time. The X-axis is long.

Trust me — as you probably know — there’s plenty of the so-called “quitting” along that X-axis.

The big secret here? You’re more likely to reach your destination if you come to enjoy the practice for its own merits, and no longer see it as an ignorable means to an end.

We hear a lot about process. It’s the journey, not the destination. They’re right.

The destination is more like a diploma that refers to the breadth and depth of knowledge gained. A goal is a spark and a nudge for attaining an even bigger deal: who we become along the way.

At some point along the X-axis, we come to accept we’ll kvetch, worry, be disappointed, and feel meh at times. This is not quitting or evidence in support of quitting. Nobody runs 100 miles jubilant the whole time.

When we don’t quit in the face of our self-haranguing and the challenges of our goal, in my experience, that’s the real masterpiece of accomplishment.

It’s about process — the glory and the muck of it.

When an ultrarunner focuses only on the finish line in a long, technical, hot run with lots of uphill climb, they’re using binoculars to run. Binoculars are cool when viewing the moon, but you can’t see the ground you’re standing on if your life depended on it. You miss all the joy right here, right now. You miss your chances to improvise and divert trouble.

Hug your goal, but don’t stare at it through binoculars.

When I think back on my ultras, I never see memories of the finish lines. I only see memories of the woods and the vistas, the arduousness overcome, the laughter, the time spent in nature, the people, oh those fabulous people.

One of the lasting memories I have of that sport is from the Hellgate 100K. It’s held in December in the Appalachian Mountains and starts at midnight.

Early in the race, you climb a switchback trail up one side of a mountain. Once you reach enough elevation, you can look below and see a zig-zag line of headlamps bobbing in the darkness — flickering stars on the ground. It’s an amazing thing to see.

That race is hard and cold. It starts when you should be asleep. There’s kvetching. Yet, the beauty of that goal overpowered its difficulty. Maybe because I allowed it to.

I’m sure you could easily argue, “Steph, what’s so beautiful and majestic about getting to bed on time?”

I’d say, “You just haven’t noticed it yet. It’s there.”