I mean, I thank you for the philosophical advice. But for me, it does matter where I place. I want to win. I wish I had the zen or just the attitude to accept my results and be happy with giving my best. But I don’t. I want to win. And I will do everything I can to win. I’m a results driven person. The upside (if there is one) of not getting the results I want is that it’ll drive me to improve and get better and put in the work to get a better result in the future.
Looking at past races, I don’t remember if “I gave it my all” in the sense that I’m not looking back fondly on a bad result knowing I did the best I could; I’ll look back at the result and wonder if I could have done better or done something different. I know it works for some people and it seems to work for you. Maybe I’m a little envious of that. But it just doesn’t do it for me. That’s not to say I judge myself on my race results. I’m not going to be on my deathbed mad that I got 4th place in a local crit instead of winning. But every race I enter I go in with the plan to win, or at least get a result that I think is achievable.
And back to my original question which was just about training, I think I’m going to do a Threshold progression then a short race prep block to get ready for my A race. I think that will help me in the long run for the races I have later in the season.