On quitting and Simone Biles
Our oversimplified stories
Two years ago, I quit a marathon. I just walked off the course and sat down, at Mile 22. “At Mile 22!” people always exclaim when they hear this, because especially if you’ve never run a marathon, it seems RIDICULOUS to quit after you’ve run 90% of the race. If you have run a marathon, then you might know that the last six miles tend to be an epic battle with your screaming body and the depths of your battered soul. In that case, I lost the battle.
At the time it felt really, really good to walk away, and also terrible. There’s the immediate relief, but then there’s the dread. The aftermath, the questioning, the shame. There is nothing easy, nothing pat, about that choice.
But that’s not what one would think reading the coverage of Simone Biles. I had no idea she’d decided not to compete in the women’s gymnastics final until Elena and I were watching our nightly Olympics, and the announcers started flipping out as Biles packed up her gym bag. “This has NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE!” they intoned with peak drama. “WHAT is GOING ON?”
Elena was mesmerized. This is not something children often witness: an adult, especially an idolized one who is featured in gleaming ad after gleaming ad as a near-God, stepping away and saying they can’t do something. While part of me appreciated the lesson that there are times when it’s okay – essential, in fact – to say no, when it’s okay to stop if our bodies hurt and our hearts and minds are crying out, another part of me felt a rush to clarify that this didn’t mean Elena should give up when things got hard. She’d run a one-mile race the week earlier, and I know she came out way too strong – at a full sprint, trying to prove herself – and I worried, waiting for her at the finish line, that she would stop halfway through and I’d be losing my mind trying to find her. But she didn’t stop. She ran the whole thing, waving and smiling weakly as she crossed the line at an 8:40 mile, clearly totally rocked by her effort but holding it together. She was a bit dazed that evening, but the next day she told me she wanted to run another race, this time taking care to pace herself at the outset.
I want her to know this feeling: to push yourself to the absolute brink and to hold on, hold on, hold on when you think you can’t do it, and stun yourself when you can. I want her to carry that with her in sports, in birth, in life. At the same time, I want her to know that nothing matters so much it’s worth hurting yourself for, it’s worth acute mental suffering – which is qualitatively different than the suffering of a peak effort –nothing is worth performing for others while you yourself fill up with dread. I want her to know that we love her and she is worthy and wonderful whether or not she excels at running or swimming or reading or violin or whatever she may choose down the line.
But it’s not possible for us as a country, I believe, to hold complex truths like these any longer. I knew the second Simone Biles told her teammates she loved them but she had to stop that her decision would cleave the U.S. immediately into two camps: one who saw her as a hero, the ultimate champion of pick-your-progressive-issue; the other who saw her as a farce, a sad example of the country’s decline from a gloried era of macho toughness. I knew immediately that all of the complicated intimacy of that moment, when we got to see a star show us her vulnerability, her sadness, her loss, the difficult truth that “life is not gymnastics” and yet gymnastics has been her life, was instead reduced to a culture war talking point.
Quitting is difficult. It is arguably as difficult as continuing to compete through pain and against all reason. It puts your demons front and center for everyone to see. It calls into question your own narrative of your life and the simple narratives people have built around you, the simple narratives we all tend to cling to everyday about who we are and will be and the way the world works. Quitting is a profoundly human act. If I were Simone Biles I would have left the arena right then and gone back to my hotel room and sobbed my eyeballs out, like I did shortly after I quit my marathon (which no one was watching and exactly 0 people cared about!). But Biles stayed. She stayed on camera, while the announcers murmured through astounded suppositions and replays of her worst mistakes, and she cheered for her teammates. She cheered for the Russians!
She showed us how to quit with grace, with humility but without shame, she showed us how to see and confront quitting. And then she came back and competed again a few days later, on the world stage, a truly heroic feat. That, I told Elena, is courage. And it’s wisdom. It’s the wisdom of knowing that whatever you’re doing – whatever will give you the medal and the accolades and the attention, the publications and the glory and the recognition – isn’t really you. So you have to do it for something else, and whatever that something else is – love, strength, solidarity, meaning, a feeling of being alive in the world – Biles rediscovered in the interval between dropping out and coming back. You have to have that, or none of it is worth it at all.
As of about a month ago, I’ve started training for another marathon. I’m doing it differently now, more seriously and also more lightly. If I quit, I quit, but having quit once, I want nothing more than to not do it again. No stories of epic heroics or pathetic weakness. No big narrative, no symbols. Just the joy and rigor and commitment of the daily work, lacing up my shoes at 6 am on the back steps.
The other day, in the grocery store parking lot, a homeless man holding a cardboard sign came up and offered to take my cart back for me. “Can you spare a dollar for an old man?” he asked.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, “I don’t have any cash.”
“That’s alright,” he replied, taking my cart anyway. “Then you just say ‘Bless you,’ okay? That’s what you do.”
I blinked in the early summer dusk, ashamed, empty-handed, strangely grateful.
“Bless you,” I said.
“Bless you too,” he replied.
The story of that moment could be told in many ways. A mawkish story, a story of white ignorance and privilege, a story of systemic racism, a story of problematic age-old tropes, a story to represent a reality.
But I want to tell it as a non-story, if that’s ever possible. As, I’m human, you’re human. In this parking lot where a hawk is poised on the lamppost, where trains rumble by behind the fence, where everyone juggles bags of food and car keys and bustles along in their lives. I want to tell it raw, raw as Simone Biles not realizing her golden dream, raw as her putting her sweatsuit back on and staying on the sidelines to shout “You got this!”, raw as explaining to my daughter that all of life is wanting and letting go, wanting and letting go, and each has its own pain and its own necessity, and often as we weave between the two all we can say to one another is,
Bless you.
Recommendations:
I’m sure this piece will be criticized to within an inch of its life and I generally find David Brooks very problematic but dang this was interesting. The problem with anti-racist self help. On the roots of “customer service” and class identity. The Daily on the story of Simone Biles. By far my favorite take on Simone Biles and quitting.
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