The end of my elite running career was anticlimactic. There was no fanfare. There was no last personal best I chased down before hanging up the spikes. No moment where I walked off the track knowing that it was my final serious workout.
Instead, I had two surgeries in 9 months, and the recovery from the second one lasted long enough that I started to drift away. While I was drifting, I started moving in another direction. Then I was offered a coaching job, and that sealed the deal. In hindsight, it’s obvious I was at the end of the road, but at the time I couldn’t admit it to myself.
This is the part nobody warns you about. You never know which race or which year was your best until it’s behind you. We’re programmed to believe the next one will always be better.
So I kept going until quitting was no longer a decision. I did not plan an exit strategy. I waited for life to make the call for me.
A few weeks ago, I made the case for persisting through adversity, for chasing the goal regardless of what the season throws at you. I still believe grit is one of the most valuable traits an athlete can have, but grit is indiscriminate. While grit can get you to stick with hard things that are worthwhile, grit can also get you to stick to things that are no longer worthwhile. The trick is figuring out the difference.
There is a fine line between heroic persistence and foolish stubbornness, and it’s almost impossible to see while you’re standing on it.
Where this shows up
In his hit song, The Gambler, Kenny Rogers illuminates a problem we all face:
“You’ve gotta know when to hold ‘em, when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, know when to run.”
Usually that set of options is invisible to us when we face challenges. Under pressure, most of us can only see one: double down no matter what. Folding is an option we hardly ever consider.
Strategic quitting should be considered a skill, but we neglect it because we have conflated it with failure. When done well at the right time, it allows you to make good decisions in a changing world.
I see the quitting problem in three places:
The workout. As discussed in this newsletter, when a workout starts to unravel, most athletes automatically ask, “Can I finish this?” rather than “Is finishing still productive?” Stopping feels like wasting the effort they’ve already invested.
The season. The main way runners discover the season is over is by running one race too many. I see it constantly at the professional level. Once the national championship has passed, there’s a buffet of European meets stretching months further into the summer. The default option is for an athlete to race as many as they can, even though sustaining momentum that deep in the summer is very difficult. When a season’s endpoint is driven by an athlete’s appetite rather than by a hard constraint on the calendar, it’s very likely they’ll go too far and be forced to stop after a terrible last race.
The career. This one is by far the hardest, because it’s not a temporary setback you can recover from. It means separating yourself from the most sacred part of your identity, one that has rewarded you for a decade or more. For high-level runners who continue past their peak, the last few years are usually filled with agony and frustration. Like my own departure, it’s almost never a decision. A vanishingly small number of athletes quit on time. The rest keep going until an external variable forces them out.
Why it’s so hard to quit
Many of us have had the experience of watching a movie and watching a character make an obvious mistake. You want to climb into the screen and shake them. “Look behind you!” or “Drive to the airport and don’t let her get on that plane!”
Similarly, it’s much easier to spot other people’s mistakes (or declines) than your own. Because of that, we expect that people should see in foresight what they can so easily see in hindsight. But when you’re living it, it doesn’t work that way.
Consider the graphic above, which I think is a brilliant illustration of the quitting problem. Nearly every long-running comedy show ends in the red, or with a rapid drop in audience ratings. It’s not like the producers are blind to these ratings. And even though it seems obvious when to stop, there is enormous psychological pressure to continue.
Successful athletes face three powerful forces against quitting:
Persistence has been rewarded their whole career
Their personal identity has become attached to the pursuit
Years of investment create enormous sunk costs
The very traits that got them to the top rig the scale towards staying in it. Underneath all of it is the thing we actually fear the most.
We hate to close a mental account “in the losses.” The moment between failing and having failed is intolerable, so as long as there is a sliver of hope, we keep the account open.
People wait for extraordinary evidence that the end has come. Hints are not enough. The world whispers feedback until it screams.
Close calls are not close calls
There is a study I love conducted by Steve Levitt, the economist behind Freakonomics. He recruited people who reported being roughly 50/50 on a major life decision. They were agonizing over quitting a job, ending a relationship, or making a move.
Levit nudged the decision forward with a virtual coin flip. If it landed on heads, they were meant to make the change. Tails meant stay.
More than 20,000 flips later, he was astounded to learn that people actually listened to the coin flip. It genuinely moved behavior, which gave Levitt something close to a randomized controlled trial on major life decisions.
He learned that six months after the coin flip, the ones who landed on heads and made a change were measurably happier than those who maintained the status quo. This reveals two fundamental truths about quitting behavior:
Close calls are usually not close. If you have deliberated at length and still land at 50/50, you are not considering options of equal value. You have to factor in how much psychological pressure is rigging the scale towards maintaining the status quo.
We are excessively cautious when facing life-changing decisions. We are far more bothered by the downside of change compared with the downside of staying the course. Arguably, we require far too much evidence to change.
Quitting on time will always feel like quitting too early
I saw this play out in my own college running career. My freshman class at Stanford had 5 guys. Our class felt special. The unspoken expectation was that we would have no attrition. Everyone would make it to senior year. That did not happen.
Three of my teammates and closest friends decided to leave the team before senior year.
On paper, this attrition seems like a failure. But I’ve been in touch with these guys for the last 5 years, and they’re all thriving. It took them a moment to adjust to life after collegiate running, but once they did, they all discovered new passions. When I talk to them about leaving the team, they’ve unanimously said it was the right decision and that they should have done it earlier.
The takeaway is uncomfortable. Most people jump ship only when the odds of failure reach around 99%. At that point it’s not even a decision anymore.
If you want to quit on time, research suggests you have to be willing to quit earlier than feels warranted, even if nothing dire is happening yet.
Practical Guidance
How can we make better quitting decisions? Here are three ideas.
Set kill criteria in advance. The bias to persist is strong enough that “I’ll reassess if things go badly” is functionally the same thing as having no plan. You’ll probably stay the course and do more damage. Instead, name the conditions for stopping before you’re in too deep, paired with a date. For example: “If my injury is still above a 4/10 on the pain scale by October 1, the cross-country season is done, and I will then do 3 weeks of cross-training.” Nobody makes good decisions under stress. You need some decision-making assistance from a calm version of yourself who’s less attached to emotion and outcomes.
Get a quitting coach. We are much better at spotting other people’s mistakes than our own. Find someone close enough to understand the situation and blunt enough to ask the question everyone else is afraid to ask. Most people protect your feelings in the moment, then tell you afterward that they knew you should have left months ago. Give someone explicit permission to tell you before they reach that point.
Put more rooms in the identity “house”: Even if the vast majority of your attention is on a singular pursuit, take some time to cultivate interests outside. Think of identity as a house with many rooms. Some people live entirely in the office and never maintain the kitchen or family room. Eventually, those rooms will rot away, and then a pipe bursts in the office, and they’re effectively homeless. It’s far easier to walk away from something when you know what you’re walking towards. Do a little upkeep elsewhere, so you have something to fall back on. What you think is a backup plan will often turn into your plan A.
Conclusion
I’m not writing this to talk anyone out of the sport. What I want is to move quitting out of the category of moral failure and into the category of competitive advantage, because that’s where it belongs when the decision is made for the right reasons.
The real failure is continuing to pursue something that is not worth your time. We tend to look at waste as a backward-looking problem. We worry about the time, money, or resources we have already spent on something and use that as justification to continue; however, those things are gone forever.
True waste is forward-looking. It’s the choice to spend another day, another dollar, or ounce of energy on a dead-end pursuit. Quitting expands your options, reorients you, and helps you find something with a higher degree of match quality.
Grit is only worth something if it is aimed at the right thing. Quitting helps you aim it.
As a person who quit their long run 15 min in today because of a familiar niggle that has taken me out from training before, I feel this!! Quitting before you’re forced to does not feel good in the moment but can (potentially) have big benefits.
Good stuff. I found a lot of this applies to work, too. Might be biased because I just quit a job of nine years... probably on time, but some days it feels early.