A few days after Harricana, I started thinking about all those promises I’d made to myself in the forest. I love ultramarathons, and I don’t want to stop doing them, but I do need to stop doing them like this.

Somewhere along the way, I’ve become pretty good at not dying doing things I’m poorly prepared for. While that’s a useful skill, it’s also a terrible approach to running and life. Surviving doesn’t magically make the decisions that put me in a poor position good ones. And there’s a massive distinction between overcoming adversity and manufacturing it yourself. Lately, I’ve been manufacturing an awful lot of it.

It’s easy for me, in hindsight, to look back at Harricana and tell another heroic little story about perseverance, but that’s disingenuous. The reality is that I again arrived at the start inadequately trained and completely unprepared, and twenty kilometres in, I wasn’t so much running Harricana as negotiating with the consequences of my own poor decisions.

Failure has a wonderful way of teaching lessons. Success can teach you completely the wrong ones. Every time I survive one of these things, I get more evidence suggesting that my ridiculous approach works. Never mind that I’m limping around in agony afterward, losing toenails, or writing yet another blog post explaining why the latest race became a complete shitshow. There’s a medal hanging on my wall, so apparently the plan was brilliant.

It wasn’t, and the medal only proves I finished, and that’s it.

What I haven’t really discovered is what I might be capable of if I actually did this properly. And the more I think about it, the more I realize that maybe the answer isn’t to immediately sign up for another ultramarathon and promise myself that this time I’ll train harder and things will be different. Maybe the answer is to step away for a while, and not because they’ve become too hard. I simply respect them too much to keep doing them half-assed.

Training for an ultramarathon shouldn’t be something I squeeze into the spaces left over after work. Training shouldn’t be the first thing sacrificed when work gets busy and then magically become important again three weeks before race day. That’s not how I want to do this anymore.

This strangely brings me back to retirement. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what retirement actually means to me. I’m beginning a four-day-week experiment in January. Fifty-two little retirement days, I’m calling it. The idea isn’t to suddenly stop working and start feeding ducks at the park, but to create some space in a life that, for a very long time, I’ve allowed work to occupy almost completely.

Ultramarathons may eventually be part of what I put into that space.

I imagine being retired, or substantially retired, looking at the calendar six months out and deciding I’m going to run the Arc of Attrition—and then actually building my life and training around it. I imagine having the time to prepare properly for something difficult instead of simply having enough stubbornness to survive it.

Maybe that’s retirement for me. Having enough control over my own time that I can decide something matters to me and then give it the time it deserves.

Harricana finally made me realize there are things I care about too much to keep giving them whatever time is left over. Ultramarathons are one of them.

So I’m done with them for now. There, I’ve said it.

There will still be running. There may still be races. I’ll almost certainly continue doing stupid things because I’m realistic about the person we’re dealing with here. But the really tough stuff can wait, and that doesn’t feel like quitting to me. If anything, it feels like respect. Respect for what these races demand. And maybe a little more respect for myself than believing I should be able to bullshit my way through anything simply because I’ve become pretty good at suffering.

Someday, I’d like to stand on another ultramarathon start line knowing I did everything I reasonably could to get there ready.

Maybe it’ll be the Arc, maybe it’ll be somewhere else. But for now, I’m going to step away.

And maybe, in a strange way, giving up ultramarathons for a while will help take me exactly where I want to go.