As with all adages, “give yourself permission to fail” depends a bit on context.
Today was the first day that I felt like this Couch to 5K interval training—three sessions per week that alternate stumbling jogs and grateful walks—is starting to stick as a habit. I no longer look to the next session and say, “Oh, shit, I have to run tomorrow.” So there’s that.
I’ve made some progress, too. The first week I was definitely “Couch”—the six one-minute jogs, broken up by 90-second walks, felt pretty close to my limit. Now, my longest set includes a five-minute jog. Still weak, but also a measurable improvement. So that’s good.
But I’ve also dropped back a week.
The first four weeks pushed my sedentary butt pretty hard, but the demands of each day were the same for the entire week. This meant that, each week, I really only had to power through Monday’s workout; if I felt tired on Wednesday or Friday, I could remind myself that I’d already succeeded on Monday.
Last week, though—Week 5—the schedule changed; the demands increased each day. And, for whatever reason, I quit at the three-minute mark of the second eight-minute run. “It’s okay,” I said to myself. “I’ll just repeat last Friday’s run on Friday, and start Week 5 again next week.”
Then Friday came, and I discovered that I couldn’t finish that previous Friday’s workout, either. And telling myself, “Hey, I did this last week,” didn’t help, either.
So I decided to start Week 4 again. I know that repeating weeks is a fairly common thing—a friend of mine mentioned that she had to repeat a few weeks, and the program makes it clear that this is to be expected. It’s not that big a deal.
But during this morning’s warm-up walk, I wondered if giving up that first time—Week 5, Day 2—had opened up a willingness to give up too easily. I mean, I know (intellectually) that the body sends “Hey! I’m at my limit!” messages to the brain long before we’re even close to those limits. I reminded myself of this even as I was slowing to a walk on Friday. But I still quit.
Was I giving myself permission to fail? Is that why I quit the second time, even though I knew I’d successfully completed the interval the previous week?
Giving oneself permission to fail is a pretty common trope. I don’t know how long it’s been around, but I’ve certainly noticed it more since the tech world started hyping the “Fail fast, fail often” philosophy. You’ve probably heard this type of thing: If you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough. Or: Failure is not the opposite of success; it’s part of success.
There are a lot of nettributed quotes online about failure, too: Einstein (“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new”), Churchill (“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm”), Michael Jordan (“I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed”). And so on.
As with all concepts reduced to a pithy adage, though, context matters. This is why so many adages contradict each other. Which is it: “Look before you leap,” or “He who hesitates is lost”? “You’re never too old to learn,” or “You can’t teach old dogs new tricks?” “Better safe than sorry,” or “Nothing ventured, nothing gained”?
The idea that we need to give ourselves permission to fail is meant, I think, as an antidote to fear—the fear of trying new things, or doing things that might fail. I certainly need to give myself permission for that type of failure—to finish writing the thing that isn’t working yet, for example.
But that’s a different context than my C25K struggle: there’s nothing to learn from that failure, no success waiting to rise from those ashes. It’s just giving up.
Today’s C25K, dropping back to the beginning of Week 4, went reasonably well. I struggled a bit by the end, and felt that I needed to tell myself—perhaps overdramatically, but one must build good habits—that I did not give myself permission to quit today.
We’ll see what happens next week, when I hit Week 5 again.