I straight up quit a marathon.

I want to say I’m rarely a quitter, but I don’t know how true that statement really is. I do have gumption, for sure. It’s a fact - I won a tenacity award in college. I had a real Rudy sort of vibe in any high school sport I played. I am patient, I am scrappy. But I’m also very singular in my recognition of purpose and reason.

To wit, I fuggen straight up left a marathon league around week 3, this past Sunday. Told Rob (aka Otter Guy, aka The Appalachian Gentleman, aka Rob) I was done with it, packed my stuff, and walked home. All I needed was a ball and I woulda been the poster child for some pouty kid who didn’t get his way. But, if I’m honest with myself, my decision to quit was multifaceted.

I was coming off a week-long series of migraines

Something at least a few of you know is how common it is for me to get big bad brains when the pressure changes. Thunderstorms, rolling rains, hell, even just a temperature shift can make my noodley brain go wild. This past week was a real disco in there (my skull), so I was already starting at…well, kinda a shitty point. Still, when I woke up in the morning, I decided to ignore the warning pains in the thought factory and go to the Meadery anyway. After all, axe throwing is a good way to escape responsibility, and maybe it’d work for ignoring the responsibility we hold to our own physical health. What am I saying, of course it’d work for that!

How-ev-er, axe throwing did no such thing. Not only did the headache get worse as the day went on, but it was making my vision all sorts of ruined. Imagine, if you will dear reader, trying to look at the target through an aquarium filled with a thousand tiny, blurry, dancing worm fish. And while there was some sort of beauty to that wiggledance, it wasn’t very conducive to throwing anything even remotely close to accuracy. But even in this, I was still pretty happy to be at a marathon. After all, I was surrounded by people who I cared about, and who were fun to be around.

But then the grumps came

One absolute truth I hold onto in this crazy ol’ dumpster fire we call life, and it’s the following: If the thing you’re doing is supposed to be fun, and it isn’t fun, you should stop doing it. “Fun” in this case is a pretty nebulous thing: I don’t mean, like, laughing the whole time and losing yourself in the ecstasy of joy. I mean “fun” as in “this brings me happiness and satisfaction.” Does that make any sense? Maybe an example:

Fishing hair out of a clogged shower drain isn’t exactly what I’d call a rip-roaring blast, but it’d be a lie to say I don’t feel at least a little of the same pride a fisherman feels holding up a catch when I manage to pull up some nightmare taxidermy - do you get what I’m trying to say? “Fun” can be lots of things, but it’s gotta serve a purpose, and it’s gotta bring at least some sense of accomplishment or, I dunno, relief from the things notably not fun.

But this past marathon. Sheesh. I think I enjoyed the first four matches I threw. After those, I was getting angry at myself for not throwing well, I was getting angry at people who were asking if I was alright (I certainly had a presenting face that communicated I was having a not-good time), and I was getting REALLY grumpy about the amount of pain I was in. By my 10th match or so, I realized I was throwing as fast as I could just to be done with the experience.

And that, friends, is the dumbest way to throw. Not fast, I don’t mean that. I mean throwing just to be done with throwing. There are so many better ways to waste money and time. Ways that don’t throw off the vibe for everyone else, in particular.

So I made the call, and I don’t regret it

My options, as I saw them, were as thus:

1. Ignore my feelings (mental and physical) and just limp through the rest of the marathon/tourney

2. Put up with hating everything I was doing until the tourney, and then leave

3. Leave

Now, I’m not saying I made the best choice. The best choice would have been to recognize how horrible I felt when I first woke up, called up Rob (aka Otter Guy, aka Appalachian Gentleman, aka Rob-a-palooza, aka Rob-a-doodle-doo), and tell him I wasn’t up for it. But I think leaving when I did saved me from a lot of future pain.

It also occurs to me, now, I saved myself from polluting something which, up to this point, provides a lot of joy. If I stayed and muscled through (or stayed until tourney time and then left), I think I could have really changed my brain chemistry around axe throwing. I feel like I could have, I dunno, broken the magic of it - the excitement of the experience.

I’ve been excited to throw axes every single time I’ve done it. Whether it’s practice or a league night or a tourney, I’ve loved every minute of it, no matter how well or how poorly I threw. Sunday was the very first time I didn’t give a damn about the experience. Point in fact, I can say with certainty it was the first time I hated axe throwing. And by realizing it (and yanking myself out of that space), I feel as though I managed to prevent a longer-lasting harm to one of the few things that reliably brings me joy.

Cool story, Badger. Why are you sharing it?

Yeah, fair enough.

I wrote all this out because I think it’s worth recognizing something I hadn’t seen before, but has some merit. People talk about burn out in this sport. We talk about whether it has lasting power with new throwers and staying power with experienced ones. And we joke about throwing no matter what.

But, honest to clutch, giving up on Sunday so I could go home and rest/calm down my grumpiness felt really, really smart. I didn’t like missing a chance to talk to so many people from Baltimore and Choppers, or the chance to be a good ambassador for our little Meadery, but I sure as shit would have done a bad job of it, anyway. Instead, I allowed myself permission to just be done with it, and to come back in the future with a better perspective and mindset.

What I want to get across is this: axe throwing, alongside anything we get a chance to enjoy, won’t always be the thing you’ll get the most enjoyment from - at least not every time. And instead of forcing yourself to enjoy it, allow yourself to not enjoy it, and recognize when it’s best to step away from it - not because you’re giving up, but because you wanna preserve that enjoyment in the future.

Okay, real talk: I’m writing this at 1 a.m., and I have no idea if any of it makes sense (I still have a headache), so you’ll have to let me know if anything I wrote actually carries any weight. Or don’t let me know. Just play along, dear reader.