Stop Quitting When It Gets Hard

How To Learn How To Keep Going

Why you quit

“Today is the day I’m finally going to put this thing together” I say to myself for at least the tenth time.

Flicking on the lights to the basement, the dungeon, I trudge step by step downward to do battle again with an old nemesis; assembly of a machine

Each step gets heavier, creaking louder, until I’m at the bottom, with a Wahoo bike trainer staring back into my soul, tempting me to ‘try again’ without resorting to quitting before I’ve even started.

This time, I’m bold. I actually open up the box and take a read of the instructions.

In race terms, I’ve gotten myself across the starting line, now I’m inside the action.

I look down to read instruction one about ‘placing your own cassette, similar to the one on your bike, onto the machine before you can then fit your bike onto it.’

You see, a Wahoo bike trainer is a neat little machine that allows you to attach your own physical bike to it and turn it into a digital indoor bike trainer that hooks up to your laptop and is like riding a bike inside a video game.

I’ve seen teammates on the Endurance Training Team I coach on, Tribal Training, use these for years. I figure I could pick one up and train for the two triathlons I committed to in 2026 in the basement on my bike.

But then I forgot that I don’t do well in contests against instructions where the object is to get something built and operational.

Reading the first instruction confirms it to me, I have no idea what I’m doing.

I hastily order the same cassette on Amazon and endeavor to try again another day, and gear up to take on more outdoor bike riding in the winter instead of just solving the problem and getting through the instructions.

Now, I didn’t quit on bike riding, far from it. I rode outdoors in sub freezing temperatures for months, enduring wind and rain, needing ski gloves and thermal underwear to make it through some of the coldest rides. But did I quit on building the bike trainer? ABSOLUTELY.

It took a careful reading of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to recognize an all too familiar pattern creeping into my process.

And I know that this pattern is inside you too, and is one of the sneaky ways you end up quitting too soon in something you’re destined to keep moving forward through.

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What is revealed?

One beautiful element of physical training is it does not hide the truth from us. How deep you wish to follow that truth is up to you.

But tell me if you haven’t experienced this in a training or sport context before: People around you are praising you for a hard effort but inside you know that it wasn’t truly that hard for you.

For me, a barefoot beach marathon around 1hr 50mins is difficult, but I run them every weekend and have my PR down at 1hr 42mins. For someone who doesn’t run, it’s a hard thing for them to imagine themselves doing. For me, it’s just routine.

Now, here’s where the pattern starts to turn inward on yourself.

There’s a psychological sweet spot emerging that is so tempting it’s almost impossible to overcome if you don’t recognize it. You’re likely already feeling it inside.

It’s the universal pattern of wanting the be seen to do the hard thing but knowing deep down it’s actually the easy thing.

In my bike riding example above, that’s people giving me tons of love for biking in winter temperatures but me concealing the fact that I actually enjoy the challenge of inclement weather and used it as an excuse to bail on the much harder thing for me, assembling a bike trainer.

What does this do you?

This might seem like a good place to be, but it’s the place where you can go from ‘determined to push through’ to ‘I’m not so sure I need to stick this out until the end.’

And worst of all, it starts to sound really good when you convince yourself. Afterall, there’s all this outside adulation and celebration coming your way, maybe you just need to chill out and accept that praise.

It reminds me of that wild trend I heard about a few years ago of people in lifeless jobs deciding to mentally check out and do the least amount of work possible while still getting credit and making their full salaries. I think they called it ‘Quiet Quitting.’

That right there my friend is what’s going on inside of your mind. You quietly quit on your own high standard by allowing others to dictate to you what you think is ‘hard’ for yourself.

You allow others to cast in stone those limiting thoughts and attitudes you hold about yourself.

In the present, it doesn’t seem that bad, but trust me. Overtime this is a disaster for your ambition, striving, and willingness to endure in order to succeed.

It puts into your mind the acceptance of failure as a successful condition, and directionally points you down instead of aiming up.

With your eyes towards the ground, eventually, that’s where you end up, at the bottom.

How to keep going

Let’s wrap this up and get to the good stuff, how you can better know yourself and keep away from these all too familiar and consistent patterns.

To do that let’s return to the author Robert Pirsig as our guide.

Remember that idea from putting the bicycle together on the only way to do it?

He identifies a crucial element in the frustration that accompanies one’s inability to put together a machine, your own peace and mindset:

“The ultimate test’s always your own serenity. If you don’t have this when you start and maintain it while you’re working you’re likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself”

Because when you are working on a machine, in truth, you are really working on yourself:

“The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you…The test of the machine’s always your own mind.”

And why people get so frustrated, again it’s because other options, other courses of action, other possibilities, are concealed in the technical elements

“Technology presumes there’s just one right way to do things and there never is.”

Now we’re on the mark.

The reason you quit, ANYTHING, is because you believe there is no more hope.

And if you’re conditioned to think that quitting is the success condition, you don’t ever think about trying something different. You just slink back into the comfortable and hope no one bothers to notice.

Now, here’s how you an begin to break out of that pattern through training and competing.

This works for mostly any type of competition but I do believe that endurance style events tilt you more towards learning and applying this particular lesson.

Why? Because each sport has it’s own nature and set of complementary virtues that are required in order to not only succeed but merge yourself with the activity itself to become fully inside. Once there, you can learn what you truly need to.

For an endurance event, the nature is to keep going over insane amounts of distance and time. So basically, an endurance event is designed to make you want to quit almost every single step and what you need to do is figure out how to keep moving forward.

Now, if you approach the race like a mechanic fixing a machine using the instructions you’re going to be set up badly. Not because the plan isn’t a good one, but because once you’re inside the lines of the competition it generally stops working.

But if you approach the race understanding there are multiple ways to succeed along the same path, you become open to improvisation upon your preparation, and therein lies the secret to how you keep going when you want to quit.

• Quitting comes when hope dies.

• Quitting happens when despair reigns supreme.

• Quitting becomes comfortable if you can lie to yourself.

So the main thing you need to recognize about why you seemingly quit every time it gets hard is how many different win scenarios have you given yourself.

If you only give yourself one option, I got bad news for you. Eventually you’re running into failure and not using it to propel you forward.

But if you open up your mindset towards different potentials, different paths, different opportunities, then you will be able to better recognize that winning takes on many different shapes and forms once you’re engaged in the action.

That’s what running a marathon or other long distance endurance events will teach you.

It’s one reason I often aim my coaching clients towards this style of fitness.

Many of them want to overcome patterns of self-sabotage and getting into endurance style training pits them directly against that part of themselves.

For the ones who sign up for long races, I want them to focus on the internal battle in their mind, to listen to when they want to quit, and to figure out on their own how to keep going. I help prepare them in the physical training, give them logistical advice, and set them up for success, but ultimately I want them out there on their own figuring out how to keep going.

Once they crack that internal code in a race, they don’t look back.

A few success stories have seen my guys quit golden handcuffs jobs and create successful side projects that turned into their main gigs. Others have started creative projects and found success in areas where most just quit. Still others use that newfound courage to repair and lead relationships from broken to blossoming, mostly with close family.

It’s wild how consistently this works, but I’ve seen it dozens of times in my few years of coaching individuals in fitness.

I’ll dive deeper into why this works so well in an article next week but to wrap this article up let me make one more passionate plea to you and give you one more tip to implement to stop the quitting that’s eating you up on the inside.

If you struggle to keep going, you need to pursue action that FORCES you into a decision to quit or keep going so you can train yourself. Train yourself to hear the voice that demands you quit, throws all the excuses your way, and to calmy say back “I will keep going instead, thank you very much!”

Nothing does that as viscerally as a long workout you have to finish, and endurance is where the time of the workout extends out, bringing you into contact with that quitting voice far more often than any other type of exercise.

Now, here’s what you need to do today to start implementing this:

GO FOR A RIDICULOUSLY LONG EFFORT.

Make it appropriate for you, nothing that’s too far out of what you realistically can achieve. But also make it difficult, make it challenging, make it questionable in your mind if you can even finish.

If you want some help finding the sweet spot for yourself, reply to this, leave a comment, or send me a DM and I’ll help you craft out this challenge.

If you already know what that is, go out and give it all you’ve got!

The world needs the version of you that smashes obstacles and reaches towards your true potential.

If you keep quitting when it gets hard, how are you every going to make it?

This is your first step in the journey, followed by many many many more.

Let’s take them together and win my friends!