Why Do I Do This?

A high-school senior wrote this about his own career

Ayden Granados ran four years of high school track and cross country in Texas. Near the end of it, writing about what the sport had taught him, he included this:

“There was a point that I gave up on myself and truly wanted to quit, but I dug deep every time that moment came, pushing through and telling myself it’s going to get better.”¹

Read the first half of that sentence again. A senior who stuck it out, who loves the sport enough to write a letter to it, still had a point where he truly wanted to quit.

If you’ve had that thought, you’re not failing at this. You’re having the normal experience of someone who does a hard thing for years.

The question almost nobody asks

Here’s what’s strange about our sport. You’ll analyze a workout for twenty minutes. You’ll know your splits from a race eight months ago. And you have probably never once sat down and asked yourself the most basic question there is:

Why do I do this?

Shaine Casas missed making the Olympic team. He stepped away from swimming for two months. What he did with that time wasn’t training: “I just kind of reevaluated, just really thought about why do I do this.”²

He came back. Not because someone talked him into it — because of what he found: “It’s just because I enjoy the sport and I’m competitive, and I think that’s what I want.”³

That’s his answer. Yours might be completely different, and that’s fine — there isn’t a correct one. The point is that he had one, and having one changes what practice feels like on a bad Tuesday.

It’s just because I enjoy the sport and I’m competitive, and I think that’s what I want. — Shaine Casas

Asking is not the same as quitting

This is the part worth getting straight, because a lot of people avoid the question in case of what they’ll find.

Tara Davis-Woodhall had been coached by her dad since she was four years old. When she started seriously wondering whether to keep going, she did something almost boring about it: “I actually made a pros and cons list of why I should quit track, and why I should stay.”⁴

What she got out of it wasn’t really an answer. It was noticing that there was a decision — that this was something she was choosing, not just something that had always been happening to her: “I think that’s when I realized ‘OK, this is my choice.’”⁵

Most athletes never get that. They run because they ran last year. Asking the question is what turns it into yours.

You’re allowed to take a break

If your honest answer right now is I don’t know or not like this — that is not the same as being done, and this is the part nobody tells you.

A break is a real option. Casas took two months. Katie Ledecky played basketball and soccer growing up.⁶ Plenty of people step away for a season and come back.

A swim coach named Ron Usher puts it as a job for the adults: “Make it easy to come back after a break. Don’t make a temporary step back into a permanent exit.”⁷

From the inside it can feel like leaving is a door slamming. Usually it isn’t. Rosters don’t close until the season starts, and most coaches would much rather hear “I’m burnt and I need a few weeks” in November than just notice you’re gone in August.

Three things it might be

When you don’t want to go to practice, it’s usually one of three, and they need different things:

Tired. Your body is done. The fix is rest — days of it, not one easy run. Getting slower and then training harder is how you get much worse, and it happens to Olympians.

Bored. Nothing’s wrong, it’s just grey and you’ve forgotten why. That’s the one the question fixes, and the one a change fixes — a new event, a different group, a season of something else.

Something heavier. Not just practice. Sleep is off, you don’t want to do things you used to like, and it isn’t lifting. You can’t out-train that one.

You don’t have to work out which it is by yourself. That’s the whole trick: tell one adult which of the three it feels like. A parent, your coach, the trainer, a teacher. Thirty seconds, and it’s the difference between someone helping and nobody knowing.

And if you stay

Katie Ledecky is the most decorated swimmer alive, and here’s her advice to people your age: “It’s a message that you don’t have to be great right from the get-go, you don’t even have to have that goal right from the get-go, there are different journeys that everyone takes.”⁸

She didn’t grow up planning the Olympics. The goals showed up as she went.

So you don’t need a five-year plan to justify being here. You need a reason that’s actually yours — even a small one. I like my team. I like being tired in a good way. I like being someone who does a hard thing. Those all count.

If it ever gets bigger than a bad month — you’re dreading everything, you can’t sleep, nothing feels worth doing — tell somebody today. If you’re ever in a place where you don’t want to be around: call or text 988, or text HOME to 741741. Free, private, any hour.

Ask yourself the question. Then decide, on purpose, either way.