These were the words from my coach in the week leading up to The Shed Enduro, the region’s largest enduro race, as I battled the competing and accumulating pressures of work, a new position as president of the Roanoke Mountain Bike Alliance, coaching, training, and the inner pressure to never want to let anyone down. He wasn’t wrong. I was actively melting down and did not have the mental capacity to really push myself on challenging terrain–or at all.

Still, when I met with my sports psychologist just days before the race, my first question for her was, “How can I compartmentalize all this stress from work so that I can actually show up and race my best?” Hint: it’s not that easy. Instead, we once again chose to redefine my goals for the event, and look outside of the result sheet. There are some people who need to get more amped up to race: that is not me. Instead, I’ve learned that I thrive when racing is rooted in community, which gives me the chance to shift my focus from myself and my own performance (or lack thereof) to a more social context–and, as a result, almost turn down the energy–or at least the anxiety associated with racing.

Even with that shift in focus, The Shed Enduro is a challenging event. The trails at the Frederick Watershed are notoriously rocky and technical, and some of the stages resemble downhill tracks, complete with steep, rocky chutes, big slabs, and, my personal nemesis, gap jumps. I’ve been working all year to get more comfortable in the air, and knew that this race would test me. Cue the refrain of the year: “progress isn’t linear.” Despite all of the work and progress that I’ve made on jumping (including hitting much larger features just last weekend), the gaps on the course felt insurmountable, and I opted for the sometimes much slower B lines as an alternative every time I was faced with a gap jump. (And yes, I know I’m capable of hitting them. At this point it’s not a skill issue, it’s a confidence/commitment issue….I’m working on it.)

The course at The Shed Enduro is also logistically complicated. To pre-ride the course without a shuttle would require >30 miles of riding the day before the event–in addition to racing the pro stage that evening. Originally, I had planned to ride a handful of stages on Friday afternoon after work, and then try to tick off the remaining stages before the pro stage on Saturday, but plans changed, chaos (out of my control) happened, and even with managing to hop on a few shuttles (it’s who you know…), I was still a stage shy of pre-riding the entire race (and somehow missed the final turn of the pro stage, so also failed to pre-ride the rock garden at the end; oops).

For the first year ever, the race started with a pro stage on Saturday evening, which was incredibly cool, as it allowed spectators to gather and watch as we raced our first stage. One of my sponsors for the year, from Spidwerkz, even came up from D.C. to experience spectating his first-ever enduro race–which was a great sidequest afterwards, as we got dinner and got to meet in-person for the first time!

For the remaining six stages, on Sunday, it was proper East Coast enduro conditions: rain all day long. Though it didn’t always feel like it as we were pushing our bikes uphill in the rain, just getting to ride all day with a friend, in the dankness of fern-covered rain-soaked woods, was the break my brain needed. Between stages, we chatted and laughed and talked about everything–some things mountain bikes and more things not. Then when we dropped in, it was full focus on the stage (well, except for stage 5 where I was more tripod-ing than riding, barely on my bike, and managed to blow through a corner…and had a full conversation with two photographers while doing so. lol). My lack of pre-riding definitely hurt me on the first stage, and my slow go-around-the-gaps lines probably didn’t help either, but I tried to focus on riding smoothly and pedaling wherever I could.

In the end, I got third–and was only ~40 seconds off of first, which is a solid result after over 32 minutes of racing. I’m both satisfied with my result–and hungry for more, because I know that a full pre-ride and actually hitting those gaps could make a difference. But the result was never the goal. This weekend filled my cup, not because I got on a podium, but because I rode bikes with friends, shared stories of international travel over dinner, drank PBRs in the rain, laughed, hugged, cried, and lived life with this crazy community of mountain bikers.

It was a late night coming home, then back to work today, with a completely chaotic and overflowing week of non-stop “to do lists” but, thanks to a weekend in the woods with my friends, I felt more ready to face it all. Who knew, maybe racing bikes was just the break I needed?