You can delay fighting for a short time to gather your strength.

Stopping feels like losing, which is why so few people do it until they're made to. Halfway up a hill, sitting on a wall for ten minutes reads as weakness rather than sense.

Strength isn't produced during the effort. It's produced in the gaps, which makes the pause part of the work rather than a break from it.

A delay is not a withdrawal. Convalescence has a poor reputation in a culture that admires momentum, but nothing has ever recovered while it was still being used.