Focus on the feeling.

Qualitative success, doing it with soul and noticing the subtler signs of mastery.

Mantra: Focus on the feeling.

When I first started racing as a junior, I fell in love with tracking my performance using data. My dad was a stock analyst and always understood the world through numbers, so it felt natural for me to apply that same mindset to cycling. I was one of the first athletes to have a power meter, get on TrainingPeaks and start using numbers to better understand my body and fine-tune my training.

At its best, data gave me confidence. A number that felt impossible last week became achievable this week and I could see my hard work accumulate. But over time, that reliance on data also became a weakness. I started chasing numbers, convincing myself that if I just hit the right targets, I’d be ready to win. When progress was linear, it made me feel unstoppable. But when it wasn’t—when fatigue or setbacks complicated things—it left me doubting myself. I stopped listening to how I felt and started overriding my instincts, pushing harder just to make the numbers tell me I was ready.

This year, working with my coach, Barry Austin, I’ve taken a different approach. We’ve been focused primarily on something that’s harder to measure but just as important—how things feel. I’ve spent much of my training dialing in form, muscular engagement, and body awareness, doing the majority of my intervals by feel rather than by strict power targets. Instead of focusing purely on the outcome—the numbers on a screen—we’ve shifted focus to the inputs: the sensations that signal improvement, the subtle shifts that indicate strength, skill, and efficiency.

And the numbers? They’re still there. But instead of forcing them, they’re rising naturally, from the ground up rather than the top down.

With so many advancements in technology, we can now track just about everything—sleep, HRV, power, and recovery. But the role of qualitative feedback, of trusting the process and learning to feel improvement, may now play an even bigger role in reaching our athletic goals.

Message: Be a gardener…

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.

It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Musing: But how did it feel…

Think of a goal you’re pursuing. What is one way you’ll know you’re improving—not through numbers, but through experience? What will it feel like to make progress?

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