At the beginning of the year I wrote about living intentionally. I also wrote about a number of goals I had for 2011, one of which was to complete the LOTOJA Classic - a 1-day stage race from Logan, UT to Jackson Hole, WY. Here's some stats:

206 miles

10,000 feet of climbing over three mountain passes in first hundred miles.

While it is not the most intense race in the world, it was definitely outside of my perceived physical capability when I signed up for it. And so all spring and summer I rode my bike everywhere to train the best I could for something I've never done. The race is in 9 days. Today however, I submitted notice to the organizers that I am withdrawing from the event.

There's a lot of ways to slice why I'm not doing it and I try not to offer reasons or backstory because I believe in being unreasonable and overcoming the natural equilibrium humans have when it comes to change. The short of it is that I made a million small decisions over the last few months that created a scenario where some other areas of my life that need a certain level of sustained performance from me right now might suffer. So I chose to withdraw, knowing full well that I could in fact complete it.

I hate quitting. I hate it more than failing. It is a yucky, violating feeling of being small and subject to the whim of my environment. I hate not being my word and following through on commitments, especially ones that I make to myself. And *especially* when I reread some earlier claims that I've made:

Living for me is choosing to do what I want and following through on the commitments in the face of the things that I have no control over. The first cop out I hear around commitment is that something catastrophic happened. Look, if you knew that you would get a million dollars to follow through on one thing you said you would do, nothing - absolutely nothing - would stop you. Those 'reasons' and perfectly explainable barriers that stand in your way wouldn't look so hard to overcome, would they?

So needless to say, when I sent the email off this morning, I was feel pretty crummy. Until I stumbled upon this nugget by John Ruskin:

The highest reward for a man's toil is not what he gets for it but what he becomes by it.

My friend, Gary, and I went to dinner with some dear friends who have, by objective measures some pretty successful lives (financial success withstanding), as they recalled the antics of their careers we gleaned a key learning which Gary summed up:

Don't optimize around the types of experience you think you need to have. Instead, optimize your life around the person you want to be and the experiences with follow as a byproduct.

Living intentionally gets you the results of being able to say that you achieved, regardless of the cost, everything you said you would do. Congrats you won the "being intentional game". There's also a lot of the other games to play. I played the game of completing the LOTOJA Classic. I played it full out. Until I stopped playing this morning. I decided to be up to something big in life in the area of cycling and I am a transformed person as a result. Had I never needed to ride as much as I did the last 5 months, I would not know or care about gear, clothing quality and bike tuning. I would not have understood why shaving your legs matters or the intricacies of onboard and offboard nutrition. I would not be proud of my sweet ass tan lines and the experiences I lived to earn them.

And I guess that's the point. Though, I didn't complete the stated objective of finishing (or starting) the race, it's impact on my life is profound. My toil has left me a better person, a better cyclist and many other innumerable intangibles.