Nonquit

Nonquit isn’t a word, but if it were it would be something like perseverance.?But when I think of perseverance, I think of the determination to persist even when you feel like quitting.?It is like holding on and staying strong.

Persistence is awesome.?We need it and need to practice it, but we’ve all failed to persist at something.?We’ve all slacked off or given up or talked ourselves out of something when we could have done better.?Life gives us many reasons to do this.?As we get old, there is little fanfare for our daily accomplishments, and those who care for someone with dementia often get no appreciation from the person for whom they care. The person they care for sometimes doesn’t even recognize them, or the help they provide.?But helpers keep going. They have times where it gets to them, where they give in or feel helpless, but they find the way back. They keep helping, caring and loving.

So what do we call it when we falter and give up, only to come back and rejoin the struggle?

Parents, too, can hit brick walls of difficulty when dealing with their kids.?What parent hasn’t come up short at some point or another??Our efforts are not linear.?Kids’ demands and needs can come upon us with seemingly random timing and incongruous intensity.?They need when we have the least to give.?We can prepare and plan, and we do, but if all we were to do is give a steady effort we’d be demolished by one particularly bad night, one meltdown, one carpet disaster, one bout of illness.?

Perseverance is needed just to deal with the everyday, but especially for caregivers and parents it can feel exhausting sometimes.?And when we feel exhausted by the effort of perseverance, it can cause us to look to the unpredictable future with fear.?Life hits us with erratic and sporadic hardships.?So, when we feel too tired to face another surprize challenge that we can’t see the end of, it can feel really scary.?The fear of imminent failure is scarier than failing, and far more detrimental if we start to believe the fear.

Fear of failure is normal, just as predicting the future based on present conditions is often sensible.?But fearful predictions of the future harm us.?The harm manifests itself physically, emotionally and mentally.?Our normal, seemingly sensible behavior can hurt us deeply, and those who care for others are some of the highest risk people for this phenomenon.

Heroic stories appeal to us because the hero often turns off the voice of fear, or at least lets a countervailing voice rise up against it, and lives in the moment to overcome.?What and who we are in the moment can mean so much more than reaching the end goal.?The heroic journey is one that forces the hero to face the moment and become better in order to reach the end.?

This ride I am taking is a tribute and a metaphor.?There’s nothing particularly heroic about riding a bike, even for a long distance.?But training for this ride has allowed me to reflect on effort and staying in the moment.

I’m training hard.?I’m pulling my sore and tired bones out of bed six days a week for very early workouts. I’m riding stationary bikes, road bikes, and mountain bikes, running, doing push ups and pull ups in increasing quantities, and doing rehab stretches and rolling.?I am also planning my workouts, planning each week as the ride approaches, and planning the ride, including 31 potential rest/repair stops.?I’m working to bolster my leg strength. I’m learning how and when I need calories on a long ride.?I’m bringing spare gear.?I’m maintaining or having the bike maintained.?I’m riding in wind, rain, cold and heat, up hills and down them.?I’m trying to get stronger in a short period of time so I can undertake a whopper of a ride.?But I’m doing this for another reason too. I want to be better.?I want the ride to be harder than what I could have prepared for, and I want to be required to maintain positive thinking in order to get through it.?I want to get through it with grace, even swagger, but to know secretly that it pushed me to the limit.?I want it to force me to be in the moment and keep me there under exertion for a really long time, until I forget the way out.

I believe nonquit comes not from the desire to achieve a goal, but from the desire to be a better person.?Nonquit is not goal dependent. It can certainly help achieve goals and it often reveals itself in the pursuit of a goal.?But nonquit is more.?Nonquit is the revelation of character. It sometimes comes to us as a surprise.?

I experienced a little drop of nonquit on a ride recently.?I rode from Golden to Idaho Springs and back.?This 58 mile ride with 5800’ of climbing took me both ways up Floyd Hill.?On the way back I was nearly out of water, out of food, and very fatigued. Heading East, the slope of Floyd Hill is quite steep, and the road is long and straight. But it is not straight enough to see the top. It’s just straight enough to see that you have to go a long way to go uphill to still not be at the top.

I was flagging. My mind was looking for ways to tell me to stop.?The fear of becoming too exhausted and having to call for a ride back to my car was real, but I knew that stopping here would let me stop many more times on my big ride, which will be 4.5 times longer and require about three times as much climbing.?Each unplanned stop due to fatigue could be an opportunity to quit.

I looked up ahead and saw a portable highway sign on the other side of the hill with some message about future road work (perhaps to repair the washed-out areas over which I was riding, the road’s shoulder speckled and sometimes choked with rocks and dirt.) I told myself, “Just get to that sign and then you can take a break.”?There was nothing special about that location.?The hill didn’t flatten out there. The shoulder wasn’t in better condition.?It wasn’t protected from traffic. It was just an arbitrary place where I was telling myself it would be okay to quit.?I was crawling along and my legs felt like bent metal.?I wanted that rest break so badly. I wanted to stop, guzzle all the rest of my water, and then hope I’d feel rejuvenated and sail up the rest of the hill and onward to my waiting car like I had imagined when I was feeling strong earlier that day.?But I think I knew that wouldn’t happen. I was bonking and had less than a half a bottle of water left.?I had a good half mile or more to climb to get to the top of that hill, and another climb to get to Evergreen, and from there to Golden I knew there was some climbing involved before I got to coast down Lookout Mountain. ?I didn’t really know how much climbing was left.?If I stopped and didn’t feel better, then what? Would I stop on every hill on the way home? Would I stop more than once on bigger hills??Would I have to call my wife and beg her to load the girls in the car and come get me? Sure, I knew I was safe from any real danger, but if I couldn’t get through this, was I the person who was going to rise to the challenges of an upcoming epic ride? No.

As I approached the highway sign and caught sight of it in my peripheral vision, a voice rose up inside me crystal clear and said, “There is no way I am stopping.”?I pushed myself up that hill coming out of the saddle to transfer the burn to a different part of my legs momentarily, and as I did another voice asked, “so are we going all the way?”?and as it was asking the question the other voice just had a look on its face like, “that’s right, we are not stopping until the end.”?So I made it up Floyd Hill and pressed on steadily up the modest hill to Evergreen, then up the small hills on the way to Buffalo Overlook encountering many times my body really wanted to quit.?But something had changed in my mind.?It was committed not to stop because I knew I only wanted to stop out of fatigue and discomfort.?I knew I had signed up for a good amount of that in less than a month, and could not have a memory of caving in on a shorter and easier ride weighing me down that day.?So I kept going, encountering a bunch of small uphills that wouldn’t even register on a normal day, but I was so tired that even 20’ of gain felt huge and looked daunting. But as my body felt weaker I felt like I was slaying a dragon of fear and staying in the moment.?I felt like this was who I needed to be to do my big ride.?And I made it the entire way to my car (another hour) without stopping once. I felt awesome after that.

The high I was on powered me through the whole day, where I enjoyed an awesome family reunion and celebration for my dad and mom’s 80th birthdays. I golfed with my uncles and brothers the next day.?I rested the following day but then went for a 7.2 and 8 mile trail run that week (the two longest runs of my life.) I followed up the next weekend with a cold and wet 30-mile steel bike ride in the absolutely pouring rain. It was awesome.?This week I did a double workout on Tuesday and 20 five and dimes today.?The fatigue is real, but the feeling of nonquit is better.

Nonquit looks different in life than on a bike.?There are times we have to stop.?Times we should stop.?But we know when the time is calling for us to jump back in, or stay in, the struggle.?When this happens, I hope we are all able to feel compassion for ourselves as we are, acknowledge the pain, the fear, or the dread, but then find that armor of nonquit that lets us walk through the fire, the pair, the discomfort, the fear, the sadness, the uncertainty and do it will calm confidence.?