The workout that ended my smoking habit was called “Cindy.” Twenty-minute AMRAP: five pull-ups, ten push-ups, fifteen air squats, keep repeating for twenty minutes. It’s considered a benchmark workout in CrossFit, something you do to measure where you are. For a lot of people it’s not that bad.

I couldn’t finish it. Not even close.

I had been going to Riptide CrossFit in Pacific Beach for about three weeks at that point. I was 28, and I was in reasonable shape by normal-person standards — I hiked, I surfed occasionally, I walked a lot. But I had also been smoking for seven years, and when it came to sustained cardiovascular output, my lungs simply did not cooperate. I was coughing between rounds. My coach, a guy named Marcus, paused the class, walked over, and said quietly: “Your lungs are holding you back. Everything else is there.”

He didn’t say it meanly. He didn’t say it with any drama. He was just telling me a fact that I needed to hear stated plainly by someone who wasn’t trying to spare my feelings.

I went home that evening, smoked what I knew would be my last cigarette while sitting on my apartment steps, and quit the next morning.

Seven Years of Smoking in San Diego

I started when I was 21, working a summer job at a restaurant in Ocean Beach. Everybody on the kitchen staff smoked. The back-of-house culture there was the back-of-house culture everywhere: you worked hard, you smoked on break, you ate standing up. I picked it up socially and it stopped being social and started being habitual faster than I expected.

By 23 I was buying my own packs reliably. By 25 I was half a pack a day. I stayed there. San Diego is an outdoor, active city, and I was not oblivious to the fact that smoking sat awkwardly with the lifestyle around me. My friends surfed, ran 5Ks, took cycling classes. A few of them smoked too, but I was aware that I was not performing well in any physical activity that lasted more than about ten minutes.

I told myself I’d quit when I was ready. The problem was I didn’t know what “ready” was supposed to feel like. Ready kept being a future state I couldn’t quite locate.

What it actually felt like, when it arrived, was Marcus telling me my lungs were the problem. That was ready. That was the specific, undeniable, externally-witnessed moment that had been accumulating for years.

Quitting Cold Turkey: What I Did Right

I want to be direct about this because I think cold turkey gets either overcredited or undercredited depending on who’s talking about it. It worked for me. It does not work for everyone. The reasons it worked for me were specific.

First: I had a very clear and immediate positive motivation rather than just wanting to escape a negative. I wasn’t quitting to stop being a smoker. I was quitting to become a better athlete. The goal was forward-facing and concrete. I wanted to finish Cindy. I wanted to be able to do pull-ups without wheezing. I wanted to not embarrass myself at the box.

Second: I replaced the habit immediately with the gym. CrossFit workouts are scheduled and social. I was going five times a week within a month of quitting. When I had a craving, which was frequent for the first two weeks, I asked myself whether the craving was worth what I was trying to build at the gym. The craving was never worth it.

Third: I got very boring about my routine for a while. I went to bed early. I ate well. I avoided situations where smoking was likely to come up, not forever, but for the first month. I was protective about the conditions I was putting myself in during the most vulnerable window.

The physical withdrawal from nicotine is real but relatively short. The acute phase, for me, was about ten days. Headaches, some difficulty concentrating, irritability in the evenings. I ran through a lot of sparkling water and sunflower seeds. By day fourteen I felt like myself.

The psychological triggers took longer. Those were what I was still navigating at month two and three.

Beach Bonfires

San Diego has a beach bonfire culture that is hard to overstate if you haven’t experienced it. Fire rings at Mission Beach, Pacific Beach, Ocean Beach — on a warm evening you can find twenty bonfires lit between Sunset Cliffs and Crystal Pier. You bring food, you bring drinks, people bring guitars. It is one of the genuinely good things about living here.

It is also a situation where, in my social circle, cigarettes get passed around the fire.

I went to my first bonfire at about six weeks out. I knew it was going to be a test. I was right. Sitting around a fire in the dark, the ocean close enough to hear, the smell of wood smoke, people relaxed and talking — everything about the sensory environment was wired to cigarettes in my brain. And when someone offered the pack across the fire, the pull was immediate and specific in a way that the generic daily cravings hadn’t been.

I said no. I said it clearly enough that there wasn’t a follow-up. I then spent about three minutes in a conversation I was having only partially while the other part of my brain processed the wanting. And then the wanting diminished.

I went to probably four more bonfires before the trigger genuinely weakened. By month four, being at a bonfire while people smoked was just being at a bonfire. The old wiring hadn’t disappeared entirely, but it had stopped having any real authority.

What I tell people about trigger management: you can’t avoid triggers indefinitely, and you don’t want to, because avoidance just keeps the wiring intact. You have to go to the bonfire and find out that you can sit through it. Each time you do, it gets quieter.

The Workouts Changed

I went back to Cindy about eight weeks after I quit. I got twelve rounds plus some partial work in the twenty minutes. Not a great score, but I finished. I was not coughing. I was appropriately exhausted at the end, the way you’re supposed to be, not gasping in a way that felt like something was broken.

I cried in the parking lot after that workout. My coach Marcus saw me from the door, came out, and asked if I was okay. I told him I’d quit smoking eight weeks ago because of what he said. He didn’t remember saying it. He said he probably said something like that to most new people because it was usually true. I told him it had mattered a lot regardless.

In the year and a half since quitting, I have competed in my first CrossFit competition — a local throwdown in Chula Vista. I didn’t place anywhere notable in my division but I finished every single workout, which was the goal. I have hit personal records on my back squat, my deadlift, my front squat, and my overhead press. Not because I suddenly got stronger, but because my conditioning is no longer a limiter on my strength work. I can breathe through the hard parts now.

I ran a 10K last October, the first organized run I’d done since a charity 5K in college. Finished in 54 minutes, which is fine, but more importantly I finished feeling like I had something left. That was not a feeling I knew how to have when I was smoking.

For Someone Who Is Still Choosing Cigarettes Over the Thing They Want

I spent seven years telling myself I’d quit when I was ready. What I actually needed was a reason specific enough that the trade-off became undeniable. My reason was that I wanted to not embarrass myself in a class I had paid for and showed up to wanting to do well.

Your reason might be something completely different. It might be a doctor’s appointment with bad news. It might be watching your kid run around the yard and realizing you’re too winded to keep up. It might be something someone says to you that lands differently than anything has before.

But if you are waiting for a generic abstract “readiness” to arrive on its own, I would gently suggest looking at whether there’s something specific you want that smoking is standing between you and. Not just health in the abstract, but a particular thing. A hike. A race. A physical thing you want your body to be able to do. Make quitting about getting to that thing.

The withdrawal is real but it’s finite. Ten days of feeling bad is not that much compared to the years ahead without it.

You are not alone in fighting this. Every person at your gym, in your running group, on your hiking trail who has quit smoking got there the same way you will — by deciding that the thing on the other side mattered more than the thing in the pack. That decision is available to you right now.

I’m proof of what’s on the other side of it. It’s a lot better over here.