Quitting

If you follow me on twitter (I'm surprised anyone follows me on twitter really, with the rubbish that I post) then this will be old news to you.

I mentioned in my first post that I was doing a sponsored swim and I even plugged my Just Giving page in an attempt to get anyone who is reading this to sponsor me.

This is no more.

I didn't receive any sponsors - on or offline - and when you're 4 weeks into a 12 week swim this is very disheartening. I have posted several plugs on my own twitter page, I had local radio DJs retweeting the link to my page and I asked people IRL (this means In Real Life for my mother) if they would like to sponsor me, with no luck whatsoever.

I spent almost £25 on three weeks of swimming while I was at home and I would have cost me another £170 for the college gym membership to carry on while I was here and if I wasn't raising anything more than what my family would have sponsored me towards the end, I didn't see the point. Some people will moan like "But now the charity isn't getting any money when they would have got at least some if you carried on!"

The point is that I don't see the sense in spending a lot of money for a tiny amount to be raised. There has been a negative impact there rather than a positive one. I feel really bad that I spent the £25 now that I could have donated, but I can now donate some of the rest of the money I would have spent to someone else doing something else or spend it setting up something else to raise money.

A friend of mine made a good point when I first started appealing for sponsors; I'm doing something that I've already done. I have done the sponsored channel swim before, I have a certificate to prove it. But I'm trying to raise money by doing the same thing - and it's obvious that it isn't working.

This is going to make my 'Raise £100 for charity' on my 365 days in 30 ways more difficult to do, but it also means I'll be more likely to stretch myself to do something better because I can't rely on this anymore.

I'm also going to have to work harder on 'Get back into my size 10 clothes', but it's probably a good idea that the list got a little more challenging.

I don't like quitting.

Lance Armstrong said: "Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever" and this really speaks to me.

But sometimes you have to know when it is the right time to quit. And as a fresher with a knee condition who has spent a fair amount of money raising no money so far; I think I have reached that point.