When the Puppy Chokes on the Sock: Personal Reflections on Quitting

With Apologies to the Boston Celtics

When the tones of my iPhone alarm rang on the morning of May 6, 2025, I awoke in a bad mood. I stumbled out of bed to silence my iPhone and found my consternation remained, even with the quiet restored.

With a flawless execution of the plantar fasciitis shuffle, I found my way into the shower, noting the morning grumpiness was more profound than usual. It wasn’t just grumpiness...

Anger?

No, no. That wasn’t it. Not quite. It was more…annoyed. The almost angry kind of annoyed.

This called for a mental check to determine the source of my dour mood. It didn’t take long to figure it out. The last thing I’d seen before my head hit the pillow was my favorite professional basketball team, the Boston Celtics, blow a 20-point lead to a team everyone believed was inferior to them, the New York Knicks. So, I was in a bad mood as my eyes closed for sleep. Six hours of shut-eye did nothing to quell my irritation from the night before.

They shouldn’t have lost.

Given the way the first half had gone, and the fact that during the regular season the Celtics toyed with the Knicks like a puppy does an old sock, it was fair to assume they would win.

What’s more, the Celtics were the 2024 defending World Champions.

The Knicks are, well, the Knicks. They’ve been mostly futile for the past half a century. Mostly…

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Likely by now you know the Celtics would end up losing the series in 6 games. They did so by blowing a second 20-point lead in Game 2, a 14-point lead in Game 4 (a game in which we saw their superstar snap his Achilles tendon), and getting dismantled in a series-ending Game 6.

I think they lost by 375 points.

Maybe it was closer to 40 points, but you understand what I’m saying.

The puppy ended up choking on the sock.

Anyway, back to Game 1…

As I stood in the shower that morning, hot water running down my back in a way that would make a 1980s conservationist cringe, the only thing that was more frustrating to me than the loss was the fact that the loss affected me so much.

I’ve got this weird, haughty pedestal I stand on when it comes to how I cheer on my favorite teams. Where other fans might say things like, “We won!”, in reference to their teams success, I don’t. I don’t play for the team. The wins or losses are not mine to claim.

With this in mind, the Game 1 loss stung more than logic would suggest it might. Why was I so dismayed?

Perhaps I was projecting because I was nursing my own wound that was still fresh. Just three weeks earlier, I had withdrawn from the Boston Marathon at mile 20. I’d given up on a lifelong goal, abandoning the effort when the going got tough. And now, here were the Celtics following a script that seemed—at least on a subconscious level—to mirror my own.

I needed a win, and I was counting on my favorite basketball team to deliver it for me. When they failed, and doing so in a particular, familiar way, it was a subtle reminder of my own personal tendencies—starting strong before falling apart when faced with adversity.

As I considered this version of the Celtics¹, I began to see I might have been projecting my own recent failure onto them.

It is completely unacceptable for my favorite professional teams to fail.

That’s my role in the world.

If you’re thinking I’m being unfair to both the Celtics and to myself, I’d agree. But oddly, the Game 1 loss spiraled me into serious reflection about my own failures. The way the rest of the series went down only reaffirmed my projection of my own experiences onto the team.

My gripe about this Celtics team is their propensity to perform well at the start of a game and then squander the early success and lose in the end. Granted, they win far more games than they lose, but when they do lose, it seems as if they lose it in the back half of the game. They begin to fail as the game clock winds down.

The Knicks team that beat them this year seems to be the opposite of the Celtics in every way. They don’t have as much raw talent on the team. They’re likely to start slow. But in the second half of games they find something within them to outplay their competition. And it starts with their star player, Jalen Brunson, who seems to improve when the pressure is on. Perhaps Jalen Brunson is blossoming into the Knicks’ version of Red Sox legend David Ortiz? Time will tell.

The obvious retort to my argument hangs in the air.

“But, Jeff! The Celtics won the NBA Championship last year! How can you question their ways? Besides, are you really comparing your failure to just finish a marathon to their failure to repeat as NBA champions?”

I understand your point. I’m not comparing my goals to theirs. I’m just considering some perceived similarities (by me) at each individual level.

The Boston Marathon had been a lifelong goal of mine. I’d completed three marathons before. I trained for The Boston Marathon in a similar manner to those three. Everything looked great on race day. The weather was perfect. Five miles into the race the marathon app told me I was running at a pace that would best my times of the previous three marathons.

I soaked in the beautiful day. I slapped high-fives with spectators. I considered kissing one of the Wellesley College students, only deciding against it when, A) I realized those students were younger than my son, only slightly older than my daughter, and B) my wife might not find it cute, marathon tradition or not.

I snapped a picture with a friend handing out water at a hydration station. Later, my family was there to cheer me on.

My buddy, Mike, was volunteering at the 11.2 mile hydration station. These were the happier moments that day.

Then, somewhere around mile 18, I began to experience some unfamiliar chest discomfort. A bit of pain and tightness right where my ribs all come together. Right near the place I knew my heart to be pounding at 140 beats a minute.

I felt like I was going to puke. My feet were killing me.

My family had gathered to cheer me on at the mile 20 marker, just beside a medical tent.

I went over to them, and a few minutes later I bailed².

What I didn’t know was that I’d already conquered all but three-tenths of a mile of the hardest parts of the marathon. I was almost done. If I’d continued just a little bit more, everything would have been downhill.

Literally.

I looked it up a couple days later. The arrow in this picture here is the point of the race where I quit.

This is the point where I withdrew from the Boston Marathon. Another way of putting it is…this is where I quit. I wonder how many other times I’ve gotten to the most difficult part of a task and quit just before it was about to get easier.

Everybody in my life has been quite supportive of my decision to withdraw. Nobody has blamed or questioned me. My own little fan base was supportive of my effort, even though I fell short of the goal.

“You were smart to listen to your body.”

“I can’t run a mile, let alone 20!”

“20 miles is a lot! You should be proud of that accomplishment!”

Perhaps.

But again, I’d finished marathons before. But not this one.

Not my life-long goal, the grand-daddy of all marathons.

Boston.

The Celtics had been champions before. But they wanted to be a dynasty. They’d raised their bar for success.

The more I dwelled on it, watching the Celtics struggle late in games, the clearer it became that I too had my own propensity for late-game issues. I often “withdraw” from situations when they get hard. When things don’t go as easy as I might have liked, I’ve decided it was time for something new. I couldn’t have things blow up in my face.

I’m not sure I would have been so frustrated if not for the fact that it seemed that the Celtics’ plan this year was flawed. It’s one thing to get beat by a better team. That’s not what happened. They planned to win this year in the same manner they did last time, and it blew up in their face.

Their plan for winning basketball games is simple. It goes like this:

Shoot a lot of 3-point shots. Take so many three-point shots that you have enough made shots to outscore your opponent, who will rely on making 2-point shots. That, and play strong defense.

That didn’t work. When their 3-point shooting went cold, and when one of their star defenders couldn’t play up to his potential due to a mystery illness, they didn’t have a solution to their problem. When Jayson Tatum tore his Achilles tendon…well…

Series over.

I’ll grant you I’m projecting. It’s what we do with illustrations. I’m not here to argue about the Celtics game plan. I’m probably wrong. It’s just what it looks like from my mostly uneducated basketball seat.

My self-examination on the heels of the two failures had me considering more than just athletic pursuits.

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For the purpose of brevity, I won’t get into specific here. It will suffice to say the plan for my marathon run was poor. From the training to the run itself, and the execution of both.

The preparation was paltry, and the plan, flawed.

When adversity arrived, a familiar voice was not far behind. It wasn’t a voice of doubt. It wasn’t someone trying to berate me for trying something so challenging.

No. Instead it was a voice of preservation; a voice of concern for my well being.

You know, Jeff, it’s ok to stop. You don’t have to finish this. You don’t have to prove anything to anybody.

The voice was my sirens' song. Upon reflection, I'm considering it always has been.

In the moment it was easy. Sitting on a folding chair near the medical tent at mile 20, I remember thinking to myself, I cannot imagine going back out there. The little voice told me it wasn’t necessary. So I didn’t.

Revisiting the race in the following days revealed some hard information which shed more light on my decision to withdraw.

Consider:

• One of the feel-good stories of the 2025 marathon was about a guy who literally crawled over the finish line. When interviewed after the race he talked about how he threw up 8 times throughout the race. I’d been afraid to puke just before I withdrew.

• According to the official race statistics:

  • 100% of the visually impaired runners completed the marathon. (I’d passed one of these runners somewhere around mile 10.)

  • 100% of the mobility impaired participants completed the marathon.

  • 90.8% of the people over 80 years old completed the marathon.

I’m sure all of the above runners were uncomfortable by mile 20 too. Comparing my race results to theirs feels more appropriate, and my conclusions are stark.

Today, almost a month post-race, I’m beginning to understand the experiences as an important opportunity for self-assessment.

There’s another marathon next year.

There are other things I’d like to complete in my life too.

Perhaps it’s time for a new plan.

1. You can understand “this” version of the Celtics as the team that began to shape with the selection of Jayson Tatum in the 1st round of the 2017 draft for the National Basketball Association.

2. There is more to this story, including me fainting, but it’s simply too much info for this already too lengthy article.