Alone With Our Thoughts

All The Ways We Convince Ourselves to Quit

My wife and I have recently become completely hooked on the reality TV series, Alone. If you are not familiar, the show follows the self-documented daily struggles of 10 individuals as they survive in the wilderness for as long as possible using a limited amount of survival equipment. With the exception of medical check-ins, the participants are isolated from each other and all other humans. They may “tap out” at any time, or be removed involuntarily over health concerns after a scheduled medical check-up. The contestant who remains the longest wins a chunk of cash.

The show is enthralling and as we binge watch each season we learn more and more about what makes people quit and send themselves home. The show is packed with people who have mastered the mental game and end up getting medically pulled due to starvation or a physical injury, but those are less interesting to analyze. The most fascinating stories are those where the participants’ brains morph into machines dedicated to making the participant quit. No doubt, endurance racers will find parallels in these nuanced quitting stories and you may recognize yourself in some of them.

The Mind Quits First

Every endurance racer has heard that our minds quit long before our bodies do. It can happen in the starting gate or minutes or hours into the race, but for most of us the nagging voice of doubt creeps in along the way. Our minds are the perfect liars, knowing our weaknesses better than anyone else and saying just the right thing to make us quit. With practice we learn to ignore those voices but our mind is always on standby, waiting for an opening to attack in an unexpected way.

There are a lot of ways our minds can quit during a race but here are a few we see when watching, Alone.

Moving the Goal Posts

If your goal is to complete an endurance event or be the last one standing on Alone, then anything short of that is a failure. Period. Accept it. Deal with it. If you fail then learn from it and move on. But our minds are devious critters and during multiple seasons of Alone we’ve witnessed people lie to themselves and change their goal during their stay into something easier so that they can declare victory and go home. Sometimes the delusion runs so deep that the contestant has a huge smile on their face as they wait for the extraction team to come recover them from their “victory.” I wonder if after a good night’s sleep and a hot meal, they come to their senses and realize their mistake or if they protect themselves from the harsh reality by continuing to feed the delusion.

While “learning about yourself” might be a worthy take-away from an race experience or from spending 60 days alone in the arctic, it was not your goal. And worse yet, lying to yourself and calling your failure a victory is guaranteed to immediately end self-reflection and the growth that would have otherwise followed.

Gonna Quit Later, Might as Well Quit Now

Sometimes we reach a point where we have not yet failed but our brains point to the inevitability of failure. The argument being that if you are going to fail anyway, why spend another moment suffering unnecessarily? Wouldn’t it be smart to quit now and avoid the pointless sacrifice?

This one is subtle because an endurance racer often relies on the exchange of short-term pain for long-term gain. We do it in training and we do it throughout a race. But during a race our brains are quick to tell us that we are going through pointless pain and that upends the equation.

It is possible that our brain is correct. Maybe we have reached a point where we truly do have an impossible time hack to complete. Even so, it is best to not quit and we should force them to remove us from the race for missing the time cutoff. We may be incorrect in our calculations or the time cutoff may have been extended without our knowledge. Who knows?

But most importantly, missing a time cutoff is a physical failure and we already know how to overcome those — train harder! Whatever you do, don’t turn a straightforward physical failure into a harder to address mental failure by allowing yourself to quit. After all, our reaction to that voice telling us to quit is something that we can grow accustomed to. We can develop a habit of ignoring that voice or we can fall into the habit of giving in to that voice. Choose the former.

You’ve Already Quit on the Inside

Sometimes we look for excuses. Small blister. Rolled an ankle. Stomach is upset. Brought the wrong gear. Not feeling it today. You have already quit in your head but you are just waiting around for the right excuse that will allow you to save face with your friends.

The more advanced version of this is to appear outwardly to refuse to quit but just waiting to be cut for non-performance or missing a time hack. Put simply, you are not giving it your all and you know it but you’re waiting for someone else to tell you that you cannot continue the race.

Unprepared

Sometimes people lie to themselves from the outset. Their opinion of their abilities is based on self-delusion instead of planning, consistent effort, and small successes along the way. Maybe they want the virtual thumbs up on their Facebook posts for signing up for the race more than they want to put in the work and actually do the race. Regardless, sometimes people quit because they truly are unprepared and they didn’t face that reality until race day approached. You might be tempted to consider this a physical failure but the self-delusion is the root of the problem and must be addressed before anything else.

Guilt/Inadequate Support System

Without a doubt, people with families and big responsibilities in life must have their house in order before attempting an endurance event. If you’re fighting with a spouse or leaving your partner in a lurch with your children then you’ll find it easy to quit and return to get your house in order. For endurance races this is less of an issue during races but is something we struggle with during our the many hours of training.

Impacting Others

This one is rather potent for me. Growing up as a somewhat shy kid, I did everything I could to fly under the radar and not bring undue attention to myself. Even now I stress out at the grocery store checkout if my wife wanders away with the debit card and leaves me at the front of the line with a bunch of people waiting. What if she doesn’t return in time?

This quitting risk presents itself during team events where I feel like an inadequacy on my part is going to impact the team. If I am too tired or weak and I become dead weight instead of at least pulling my own weight then I’d quickly want to quit and let the team continue on without me holding them back.

Of course, this doesn’t work in all team-based challenges. If the amount of work being asked of the team doesn’t lessen with my departure then I’m more apt to stick around. If the team must carry the same load whether I’m present or not them I’m also more likely to stick around, thinking that a small contribution to the team is better than no contribution.

Medical Concerns — The most advanced brain trick of all.

A smart racer knows their body. They feel every strain or early change of gait. But once we fully develop our mental toughness, we reach a point where we are capable of pushing our bodies to the absolute brink of its capabilities and sometimes even beyond that to the point of serious injury or death.

No racer believes risking serious injury is worth a medal and a t-shirt. So we need to be honest with ourselves and actually listen to the quitter voice when it is speaking the truth about the risk to our health. It is tough because this is one of those cry wolf situations where that quitter voice has been lying to us forever and now we are supposed to listen to it? How can we differentiate between the lie and the truth?

The first step is to never allow yourself to quit over a fake injury. If you develop a habit of quitting over every little blister, cramp, or light sprain then your brain will know this is your weakest point and go back to that option at every turn. Just last night I was wanting to cut short my gym workout and go home and watch the World Series. I was tired and a bit beat down from the workout and also may have ever so slightly tweaked my back. I was tempted to use that back tweak as an excuse. It would have worked too and my coach and workout buddies would have quickly accepted my excuse. But I would have known the truth and my brain would have filed that away for future use. An easy excuse that sounds as if you are just being a smart athlete and which also preserves your ego and reputation with your coach and peers is not the kind of foothold you want to give to your lying, quitting, brain.

If the endurance event allows for it, you may find it helpful to have pit crew, support staff, or teammates who know you well and can give good advice. You need people who can see in your eyes that you are just having a down moment and who can give you a kick in the ass and send you back on the course. Those same people might need to hold you down and yell at you that you must quit for your own safety even when you think you can continue. Knowing you and a commitment to honesty are what is required here.

Lastly, you can run through scenarios ahead of time and plan your response. Know the distance and duration of the race and plan for common things like sprains. Also know the importance of the event in your plan. A light sprain near the end of your season-finale championship race? Keep going! Severe sprain or maybe even a possible break in an offseason race with no effect on your ratings or rankings? Quit, obviously, and heal up in time for the race season. Most decisions will not be as clear cut as the examples, above, but the principal is the same.

Common Strategies

While discussing this topic with GORUCK Selection finisher, Patrick Mies, he explained that in his mind he assigns a personality to the voice in his head. “Okay, I see you there lurking” he might say or think and he can then converse and argue with the voice. He expects the quitter voice to manifest itself and then he deals with it and sends it away — usually permanently.

I am fond of thinking of the quitter voice in the categories I’ve listed above, recognizing the typical time when each might appear and then dealing with them in the way that Dr. Nash deals with his schizophrenic hallucinations in the film, A Beautiful Mind. I too know the voices are illusions and I simply refuse the engage them. I hear them there as they are always accompanying me but I’ve become somewhat immune to their voices. This clip from A Beautiful Mind puts it all in perspective for me.

Conclusion

None of this is foolproof and your brain will also look for new and exciting ways to screw you even if you could master these common weaknesses. And the new, unexpected attack, is always the one you’ve not prepared for. But simply being aware of how common this experience is represents half the battle.