Everyone tells you to slow down and be present. Nobody tells you that 'being present' without anything new happening is exactly why time disappears. Anthony digs into why your years are vanishing and what you can actually do about it.
Key Takeaways
Robert Lechman's paper on time perception makes the math pretty stark. A month at age four is a meaningful chunk of your entire life. A month at fifty is noise. That's why childhood felt endless and your last decade went somewhere you can't quite place. You can't change your age, so that variable is off the table. What you can change is how much novelty you're putting into your weeks. Your brain takes longer to process unfamiliar things, which is exactly why it felt like you were in the car all day when you were a kid going somewhere new. When everything is the same loop, same roads, same coffee stop, same Tuesday night group ride, your brain stops registering it. The year compresses into nothing because nothing in it required any processing.
The cycling internet tells you to enjoy the process, stay consistent, ride the same routes, build the habit. And then these same people are shocked when they look up and five years have gone. The thing that actually differentiates time is checkpoints. Real ones, not vague intentions. Anthony's last twelve months at Roadman felt longer than the two pandemic years before them combined, not because he meditated more or journaled, but because there were concrete things to point at: new staff, revenue targets hit, listener numbers crossed. Each one of those is a marker. Time between markers feels like time that actually happened. So if you're riding the same forty kilometres every Saturday and wondering where your year went, you already know the answer. New route next weekend. Sign up for something with a date on it. Make the goal specific enough that hitting it means something.
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If this has you thinking about how you're actually structuring your training year, the 'Without a Vision the Kingdom Will Perish' episode goes further on goal-setting and why vague intentions don't produce results. And if the pandemic flatness is still showing up in your riding, the 'Why You Need to Do Less' episode is worth your time.