Quit.

Get up off the floor. Grab your gym bag. Get into your car. Drive home. Never come back.

The thought repeated in my mind as the sweat dripped off my forehead onto the spongy black floor of CrossFit Merle Hay, the gym I avoided for months while recovering from a severe reoccurrence of major depression.

The mood disorder sidelined me from work for five weeks. It affected every other aspect of my life. I distanced myself from friends and family. I ate poorly and moved less.

I am morbidly obese. At my peak, I weighed nearly 570 pounds. Over two years, I lost nearly 125 pounds through diet and intense exercise with my trainer and friend Nate Yoho at the CrossFit he owns.

I wrote about the journey in these paragraphs. In early November last year, a trauma set off my depression and anxiety, and despite the best efforts of talk therapy and medication, I started to crack.

I felt so bad over the ensuing months that I made a lot of mistakes, things my therapist tells me I did to get a jolt of dopamine — a naturally occurring brain chemical that creates a positive mood.

I won’t detail every folly I made since September except to note one of the ways I sought this dopamine release was through eating.

I abandoned the low-carb, high-protein diet that, combined with the gym, had kept me mostly losing weight and gaining strength for two years.

Instead, sugary cereals, potato chips, ice cream and even candy became regular occupants of my grocery cart and my shelves.

I went to the gym, but I was inconsistent and, when my depression became practically unlivable in July, I just stopped going.

I underwent transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, a treatment that beams magnetic pulses into your brain to stimulate the nerve endings to be more receptive to the naturally occurring mood regulating chemicals such as serotonin and dopamine.

I had the treatment twice before. Once, it kept me out of major depression for almost a year. The second didn’t last nearly as long. But this third effort really seemed to push the depression into, for lack of a better word, remission.

I took recovery very slowly. I added back in work while I was still finishing the treatments. I started being more social, likely a consequence of being less depressed.

Finally, I knew it was time to return to the gym. I had regained about 75 pounds of what I lost. I could feel the added weight in the tightness of my clothes and in my arthritic back and knees.

Going back to the gym was probably the scariest part of my ongoing recovery. That feeling is a bad beat inside my own thought processes.

Nate is my friend and checked on me many times while I was getting treatment. His gym is as friendly and supportive as a person could hope to find.

But going to the gym meant confronting one of the most obvious signs of my struggles. The strength gained through workouts largely remained, but my endurance and flexibility faded.

I returned to the gym after a work project and a brief run of a stomach ailment. Nate greeted me warmly.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“I’m here,” I said.

The truth was I was nervous as hell. I wanted to run away, just like I did the first day more than two years ago.

Nate drew up a 30-minute workout for me with a variety of exercises. One movement is called the “farmer’s carry,” in which you carry weights called kettle bells for a distance with the weights gripped in your hands with your arms hanging from your sides.

The first few reps of this were not a problem, but I soon felt winded. Nate told me to take breaks as I needed. During one farmer’s carry walk, I made it a third of the way and set the weights down.

I took a knee and watched my sweat fall onto the floor like salty rain. My chest heaved. My arms burned. My legs ached.

“What am I doing here?” I thought. “Just quit. You are a flabby middle-aged man. Accept your fate and get the hell out of here.”

I don’t know how long I stayed on my knees heaving, but eventually I stood up, picked up the weights and finished my workout.

I collapsed on the floor, disappointed, annoyed and relieved.

Later, when my breath returned and I was making a protein shake, Nate asked me how I felt.

“I wanted to quit really bad,” I said, “but I didn’t.”

“Well,” Nate said, “that’s a start.”

Columnist Daniel P. Finney grew up in Winterset and east Des Moines. Reach him at 515-284-8144 or dafinney@dmreg.com. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook.