How to Train for Your Next Century Ride While Closing Your Biggest Deal
8 July 2025
Because you didn’t build a successful business just to feel too exhausted to enjoy the ride—literally and figuratively.
There’s a moment that happens to every successful entrepreneur over 40, and I bet you know exactly what I’m talking about.
You’re sitting in your office at 3 PM, staring at your computer screen, and you feel like someone just unplugged your battery. The morning’s energy has completely evaporated. Your to-do list is still intimidatingly long, your family is expecting you home for dinner, and that bike in the garage—the one you used to love riding—might as well be on Mars.
You tell yourself it’s just part of getting older. “This is what 40+ feels like,” you think. “I should be grateful for my success and stop complaining about being tired.”
But what if I told you that age isn’t the real culprit here?
I’ve worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs just like you—successful, driven, passionate about cycling, devoted to their families—and here’s what I’ve discovered: the overwhelming exhaustion you’re feeling isn’t because you’re getting older. It’s because you’re unknowingly bleeding energy through five specific leaks that have nothing to do with your age and everything to do with how you’ve structured your life around your business.
Think of it this way: imagine you’re preparing for a long ride, but your tire has a slow leak, your chain is rubbing, and your seat is slightly misaligned. You could still complete the ride, but every mile would feel unnecessarily hard. You’d arrive exhausted, frustrated, and probably blaming your fitness level instead of recognizing the mechanical issues.
That’s exactly what’s happening with your energy right now.
The good news? Once you identify and fix these energy drains, you’ll be amazed at how much vitality you have left for the things that truly matter—growing your business strategically, being fully present with your family, and yes, getting back on that bike with the enthusiasm you used to have.
Let me show you exactly where your energy is leaking and how to plug those holes for good.
Energy Drain #1: The “Always Available” Trap
Here’s What’s Really Happening:
Remember when your phone used to be just a phone? When email was something you checked a couple times a day? Those days feel like ancient history now, don’t they?
If you’re like most entrepreneurs I work with, your phone buzzes an average of 150+ times per day. Every notification is a tiny interruption pulling your attention away from whatever you’re focused on. It’s like trying to maintain a steady pace on your bike while someone keeps grabbing your handlebars every few minutes.
You might think you’re being efficient by responding to messages immediately, but here’s what’s actually happening: your brain is spending enormous amounts of energy constantly switching between tasks. Neuroscientists call this “attention residue,” and it’s one of the biggest energy drains in modern life.
Why This is Exhausting You:
Every time you switch from writing a proposal to checking Slack to responding to a text, your brain has to completely reorient itself. It’s like constantly shifting gears on a climb—inefficient, exhausting, and ultimately slower than maintaining a steady rhythm.
Studies show this constant task-switching can reduce your cognitive efficiency by up to 40%. No wonder you feel mentally drained by mid-afternoon!
Your Path to Freedom:
I want you to think about your most memorable rides. I bet they weren’t the ones where you stopped every few minutes to check your phone. They were the ones where you got into a flow state, where you felt completely absorbed in the rhythm of pedaling and the world around you.
You can create that same flow state in your work life:
Create Your Morning Power Zone (2 hours minimum): Just like you wouldn’t answer business calls during a focused training ride, protect the first two hours of your workday from all digital interruptions. No email, no Slack, no phone calls. Use this time for your most important strategic work when your cognitive energy is at its peak.
Establish Communication Intervals: Check and respond to messages only at three specific times: 10 AM, 2 PM, and 5 PM. Set up auto-responders that politely explain your response schedule. Most “urgent” messages can wait a few hours, and this approach actually trains people to communicate more thoughtfully with you.
Implement Digital Sunset: Two hours before bed, all work devices go off. This isn’t just about better sleep (though that’s crucial)—it’s about creating clear boundaries that allow your mind to truly rest and recharge.
One of my clients, Sarah, a 46-year-old marketing consultant and weekend cyclist, was skeptical about this approach. “My clients expect immediate responses,” she said. But within two weeks of implementing these boundaries, she gained back 3 hours of deep work time daily, her stress levels plummeted, and—here’s the best part—her clients actually respected her more for having clear professional boundaries.
Energy Drain #2: The Decision Fatigue Avalanche
Here’s What’s Really Happening:
As an entrepreneur, you make an estimated 35,000 decisions per day. From the moment you wake up (what to wear, what to eat, which tasks to tackle first) to the end of the day (dinner plans, evening activities, tomorrow’s priorities), your brain is constantly weighing options and making choices.
By afternoon, your decision-making capacity is like a muscle that’s been worked to exhaustion. This is why you can start the day planning to ride after work but find yourself “too tired” to follow through. It’s not physical exhaustion—it’s decision fatigue.
Why This is Draining Your Life Force:
Your brain runs on glucose, and decision-making is one of the most glucose-intensive activities it performs. After hours of choices, your mental fuel tank is running on empty, affecting everything from your willpower to your ability to stay motivated for the things you love.
This is why Steve Jobs wore the same style of black turtleneck every day, and why Obama had only gray or blue suits. They understood that preserving mental energy for important decisions meant eliminating unnecessary choices.
Your Energy Conservation Strategy:
Think about your cycling routine. You probably have your gear laid out, your route planned, and your pre-ride routine down to a science. You’ve systematized the decision-making so you can focus your energy on the actual riding.
Morning Routine Automation: Create a consistent morning sequence that requires zero decisions. Same wake-up time, same breakfast, same workout clothes laid out the night before. This preserves your mental energy for the strategic thinking your business needs.
Create Your Professional “Uniform”: Simplify your wardrobe like a pro cyclist. Five high-quality shirts, two pairs of pants, done. Your cycling kit is already optimized this way—extend that same efficiency to your work attire.
Weekly Planning Ritual: Every Sunday evening, plan your entire week: rides, family time, work priorities, even meals. When Wednesday arrives, you execute the plan instead of making decisions on the fly.
Meal Prep Like Race Day: Plan and prepare your meals for the week just like you’d plan nutrition for a long ride. When you’re hungry, you eat what’s planned—no decision required, just fuel for performance.
Mark, a 44-year-old tech entrepreneur, implemented this approach and immediately noticed he had more mental energy for strategic business decisions. “I never realized how much energy I was wasting on tiny choices,” he told me. “Now I save that brainpower for what actually matters.”
Energy Drain #3: The Sleep Quality Myth
Here’s What’s Really Happening:
Most entrepreneurs I meet are obsessed with sleep quantity but completely ignore sleep quality. You might think you’re getting “enough” sleep because you’re in bed for 7-8 hours, but if you’re tossing and turning, waking up multiple times, or feeling groggy in the morning, you’re not getting the restorative sleep your body and brain desperately need.
It’s like thinking you’ve had a good training ride because you were on the bike for two hours, when actually you spent most of that time coasting or stopped at traffic lights. Time on the bike matters, but intensity and quality matter more.
Why Poor Sleep Quality is Sabotaging Everything:
During deep sleep, your brain literally cleans house—clearing out metabolic waste, consolidating memories, and restoring the neurotransmitters that keep you sharp and energized. Without quality deep sleep, you wake up with yesterday’s stress hormones still coursing through your system.
Poor sleep doesn’t just make you tired—it impairs your decision-making, reduces your emotional resilience, and kills your motivation for the activities you love most.
Your Sleep Optimization Protocol:
Just like you’d tune your bike for optimal performance, you need to optimize your sleep environment and routine for maximum recovery:
Temperature Control: Keep your bedroom between 65-68°F. Your core body temperature needs to drop to trigger deep sleep—think of it like the cool-down period after a hard training session.
Light Management: Complete darkness is crucial. Invest in blackout curtains and consider an eye mask. Even small amounts of light can disrupt your sleep architecture and reduce recovery quality.
Pre-Sleep Routine (Your Cool-Down Period): Spend 30-60 minutes before bed doing calming activities: reading a physical book, gentle stretching, or meaningful conversation with your spouse. This signals your nervous system to shift from performance mode to recovery mode.
Strategic Substance Timing: No caffeine after 2 PM, and no alcohol within 3 hours of bedtime. Both can dramatically reduce your deep sleep quality even if they don’t prevent you from falling asleep initially.
Track Your Recovery: Consider using an Oura Ring or similar device to monitor your actual sleep quality, not just quantity. Data helps you make better decisions about what’s working and what isn’t.
James, a 48-year-old business owner and cycling enthusiast, was skeptical about tracking his sleep. “I thought I was sleeping fine,” he said. But the data revealed he was only getting 3-4 hours of deep sleep per night. After optimizing his sleep environment and routine, his deep sleep increased to 6+ hours, and his afternoon energy levels transformed completely.
Energy Drain #4: The Inflammation Fire You Can’t See
Here’s What’s Really Happening:
This one is invisible but devastating. Chronic low-grade inflammation is like having a small fire burning in your body 24/7. You don’t feel acute pain or sickness, but your immune system is constantly activated, burning energy that should be available for thinking, performing, and enjoying life.
It’s caused by a combination of factors that are unfortunately common in entrepreneurial life: processed foods, chronic stress, lack of movement, and environmental toxins. The result is that you feel like you’re constantly pedaling uphill, even on flat ground.
Why This Silent Energy Thief is Stealing Your Vitality:
Inflammatory molecules called cytokines directly interfere with your brain’s energy production and neurotransmitter function. They can reduce your cognitive performance by 20-30% and make everything feel harder than it should be.
Worse, chronic inflammation creates a vicious cycle: it makes you feel tired, so you skip exercise and reach for comfort foods, which increases inflammation further.
Your Anti-Inflammatory Action Plan:
The beautiful thing about addressing inflammation is that the solutions align perfectly with what you already know works for athletic performance:
Fuel Like an Athlete: Eliminate the foods that create inflammation: processed foods, excess sugar, and industrial seed oils. Focus on whole foods, quality proteins, and healthy fats. If you wouldn’t eat it before a long ride, don’t eat it before an important meeting.
Add Anti-Inflammatory Powerhouses: Include turmeric, omega-3 fatty acids from wild-caught fish, and plenty of colorful vegetables in your daily nutrition. Consider high-quality supplements like fish oil and curcumin.
Movement as Medicine: Regular Zone 2 training (that conversational pace where you could talk but wouldn’t want to sing) is one of the most powerful anti-inflammatory interventions available. Even 30 minutes of easy riding can measurably reduce inflammatory markers.
Stress Management Protocol: Chronic stress drives inflammation. Implement daily practices like breathwork, meditation, or simply spending time in nature. Your recovery rides already serve this purpose—lean into their healing power.
Lisa, a 42-year-old consultant, noticed dramatic changes within just three weeks of addressing inflammation. “I didn’t realize how cloudy my thinking had become,” she said. “It’s like someone cleaned the fog off my mental windshield.”
Energy Drain #5: The Values Misalignment Energy Leak
Here’s What’s Really Happening:
This is the energy drain that hurts the most because it strikes at your core identity. You became an entrepreneur to create freedom and provide for your family, but somewhere along the way, your business started demanding sacrifices that conflict with your deepest values.
You miss family dinners for client calls. You skip rides because there’s “too much work.” You feel guilty when you’re with your family because you’re thinking about business, and you feel guilty when you’re working because you’re missing family time.
This internal conflict creates what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance”—the mental stress of holding contradictory values or behaviors. It’s like trying to pedal with your brakes on.
Why Values Conflict is the Most Exhausting Energy Drain:
When your daily actions don’t align with what you truly care about, it creates a constant background stress that burns enormous amounts of mental and emotional energy. You end up feeling successful on paper but exhausted and unfulfilled in reality.
This misalignment often leads to decision paralysis, procrastination, and a nagging sense that you’re failing somewhere—even when you’re succeeding by external measures.
Your Values Realignment Strategy:
The solution isn’t to choose between business success and personal fulfillment—it’s to redesign your business to support your values rather than fight against them.
Values Clarification Exercise: List your top 5 values honestly (family, health, adventure, achievement, service). Not what you think should matter, but what actually matters to you. Be brutally honest.
Calendar Reality Check: Review last week’s calendar. What percentage of your time was spent on activities that align with your core values? If it’s less than 70%, you’ve found your biggest energy leak.
Create Sacred Boundaries: Establish non-negotiable time blocks for your most important values. Family dinner time, cycling sessions, and date nights become unmovable appointments with yourself and your loved ones.
Business Model Alignment: This might mean raising prices to work with fewer clients, automating repetitive tasks, or restructuring your services to create more time freedom. The goal is a business that serves your life, not consumes it.
Weekly Alignment Check: Spend 15 minutes every Sunday assessing how well your week aligned with your values and making adjustments for the coming week. Think of it like checking your bike before each ride—a small investment that prevents big problems.
Tom, a 45-year-old consultant and devoted father, made one simple change: he blocked out 6-7 PM every weekday as non-negotiable family time. “I was amazed at how much more energy I had for both business and family when I stopped feeling guilty about either,” he said.
The Beautiful Compound Effect
Here’s what excites me most about addressing these energy drains: they compound in both directions. Just as multiple small leaks can leave you completely exhausted, plugging these five holes creates a powerful positive spiral.
When you establish digital boundaries, you make better decisions. Better decisions lead to improved sleep. Better sleep reduces inflammation. Lower inflammation increases energy for movement. More movement improves stress resilience. Better stress management strengthens relationships. Stronger relationships make values alignment easier.
It’s like upgrading every component on your bike—each improvement makes all the others more effective, and suddenly you’re riding at a level you forgot was possible.
Your Energy Transformation Starts Now
I don’t want you to try to fix everything at once. That’s a recipe for overwhelm and giving up. Instead, read through these five energy drains again and notice which one resonated most strongly with you. Which one made you think, “Oh wow, that’s exactly what’s happening to me”?
Start there.
Pick one energy drain and commit to addressing it for the next 30 days. Track your energy levels daily on a simple 1-10 scale and watch what happens.
Maybe you’ll start with digital boundaries—protecting your first two hours of the day from interruptions. Maybe you’ll focus on sleep quality—creating a bedroom environment optimized for recovery. Or perhaps you’ll tackle decision fatigue by simplifying your morning routine.
Whatever you choose, I want you to remember something important: you didn’t build a successful business just to feel too exhausted to enjoy the fruits of your labor. You deserve to have energy for your family, your passions, and yes, those rides that make you feel fully alive.
Your business needs you operating at full capacity. Your family deserves you at your best. And that bike in your garage is waiting for the energized, enthusiastic rider you used to be—and can absolutely be again.
The Ride of Your Life is Waiting
I’ve seen this transformation happen hundreds of times. Successful entrepreneurs who thought they were just “getting old” discover they actually have more energy and vitality at 45 than they had at 35—simply because they learned to stop the energy leaks that were silently draining their life force.
You’re not too old. You’re not too busy. You’re not destined to choose between business success and personal vitality.
You’re just one energy optimization away from remembering what it feels like to be fully alive in every area of your life.
That next chapter of your story—the one where you’re crushing it in business AND showing up powerfully for your family AND rediscovering your love for cycling—starts with your very next decision.
What’s it going to be?
Ready to plug your first energy leak? Choose one drain that resonated most strongly and commit to addressing it this week. Your future self—the one with boundless energy for everything that matters—is waiting.
Thinking about cycling training? If you want to take your riding to the next level, we have a great option for you:
- Individual coaching – work one-on-one with an experienced coach who will continuously adjust your training load to your needs and support your development as a cyclist.
