The Training Session That Made Me Quit Weed: An Athlete’s Story

It was a Tuesday in October. I’d trained that same circuit every week for two years. I knew what my legs should feel like at the halfway point, what my lungs should do in the final push. That day, everything was off by about thirty percent. Not injured. Just absent.

I finished the session. Barely. Stood with my hands on my knees in the parking lot and tried to figure out what was wrong. I’d slept eight hours. I’d eaten well. There was no reason for it. Except there was, and I think some part of me already knew it.

I’d been using cannabis pretty much every evening for about three years by that point. It started as a wind-down thing. Training hard, sleep was patchy, it helped. That’s the honest version. And for a while it did help, or I thought it did. I was still hitting my times, still progressing. So it felt harmless.

But that session in October, something landed differently. I wasn’t just tired. My reactions felt slow. My motivation to push through discomfort, the thing that actually makes you an athlete, was just not there. Like the signal existed but the volume was turned down. I’ve heard people describe depression as being behind glass. That’s what it felt like physically. I was present but buffered.

I drove home and sat with it. I didn’t immediately connect it to the weed. I thought maybe I was overtraining, or that my diet was off, or that I was coming down with something. I ran through a mental list of everything except the obvious thing.

The obvious thing took another week to admit. I did some reading. Found information about how cannabis affects sleep architecture, specifically REM and deep sleep cycles. I’d assumed I was sleeping better because I was falling asleep faster. Turns out those aren’t the same thing. The recovery my body actually needed wasn’t happening. I was getting the sensation of rest without the substance of it.

That was the part that bothered me most. I’d been managing something I thought was helping, and the whole time it was eating into the one thing I cared about. If you’re serious about performance, you track everything: calories, sleep, load, intensity. I’d been meticulous about all of it and completely blind to the one variable that was quietly dragging everything else down.

I stopped the following Sunday. Not dramatic. I just decided that was the last time. The first two weeks were uncomfortable. Sleep got worse before it got better, which is its own kind of irony. I had vivid dreams, some nights I barely slept. I knew from what I’d read that this was normal, part of the withdrawal timeline, but knowing it didn’t make it easier at two in the morning when I was wide awake and wired.

Week three, something shifted. I woke up on a Wednesday and felt actually rested. Not the flat, functional rested I’d gotten used to. Rested in a way where I wanted to get up. That sounds small. It wasn’t.

The training improvement wasn’t instant or linear. Some sessions were still rough. But about six weeks out, I ran the same circuit I’d failed in October. Not just completed it. I negative split the back half. That’s when I knew it wasn’t fitness I’d been losing. It was ceiling. The ceiling on what I could actually do.

I’m not evangelical about it. I don’t think everyone who uses cannabis is hurting themselves. But I was an athlete telling myself it wasn’t affecting my performance, and that was a lie I was telling myself because the alternative was inconvenient. The session in October just made the lie too expensive to keep.

I haven’t used since. My times are better. My recovery is faster. My drive to push through discomfort is back, which I hadn’t even realized I’d lost until I had it again. Some things you only understand in retrospect, when the noise clears enough to hear what was actually happening.