"Singing a country song soft and low."- Josh Ritter

I was listening to the song that holds the quote above today and it seemed to align with what goes through my head on a lot of the rides I've been doing recently. I've been doing a lot of training lately and it's going pretty well, really well actually, but for the first time I'm not really excited by it. Let me clarify, I'm having a great time training and I'm always excited to go out and smash some big rides, between you and me I actually enjoy training much more than racing. However, in past years I've taken good training rides and translated that in my head to all these great results I'm definitely going to get. Usually it does not work out in reality how it works in my head.

So this year for the first time I have not been jumping to broad conclusions. My training has been good, but for the first time I just don't care. It takes me some time to figure out sometimes. I guess it took me about 7 years to figure this out, and maybe I haven't figured it out yet. But for the first time I'm just waiting until the races actually start to find out what result I'm going to get, rather than "knowing for sure" in January. So we'll see if this tactic plays out differently than my past methods. But I feel a lot better about it, theres no stress and I'm not getting as worked up about my numbers in training or at least trying to.

On my rides I've been just going out and clearing my head and singing country songs soft and low, well sometimes super loud. But I think after a few years about putting too much pressure on myself I'm finally past it and I'm not so worried about racing. This may be my last year of racing and I just want to enjoy it. If some good results happen and I continue that is great, but if not I'm completely at peace with it and will finally get to go out and just train with reckless abandon how I really like to.