At Strong Girl Publishing, earlier this year, we shared a virtual Shred Girls book club featuring book 3 in the series, Jen’s Bumpy Ride, and two-time World Champion racer Kate Courtney of She Sends joined readers and author Molly Hurford on a Zoom session to talk all about the book and what winning really means to her—and to the Shred Girls!
In Shred Girls: Jen’s Bumpy Ride, there’s bikepacking, gravel racing, and more importantly, Jen has a major decision to make: Should she stick with the Shred Girls, or join the local cycling team that promises to make her faster, and help her to become a pro cyclist?
Since Kate has had plenty of experiences making decisions like this in her career , we wanted to hear from her! Kate shared her experience finding her first team and teammates, how she decided to start the She Sends Foundation and race under her own team banner last year, and how she sets big goals and smaller race-specific ones.
Here are a few of her top takeaways:
Making Decisions
Use all available information at the time: opinions of people who care about you, what you know about the opportunity, how you feel.
Once you choose a path, you can't know what would have happened the other way — so commit and move forward
Redefine Success for Yourself
Being competitive is not bad, but if winning is all you have, it's not sustainable. Ask yourself: what drew you to cycling in the first place? How can you do more of that?
At the same time, it’s okay to want to win! Multiple things can be true at once: winning can be very important and also not be the most meaningful part of sport.
Process vs. Outcome Goals
You need outcome goals AND process goals!
Outcome goals are measurable and motivating but have variables outside your control—these are great to set, but harder to hit. That’s why…
Process goals are where the real work lives: technical skills practice, attending training, nutrition planning, mindset work. Process goals can always be broken down further into smaller steps, and a good process goal should still feel good to you! Things like nailing a workout or hitting a jump should make you feel proud.
Tracking and writing things down helps you see progress you'd otherwise miss!
Our virtual book club was a total blast, and we wanted to share a few of our favorite moments with all of our listeners. If you get anything from this, consider making a donation to She Sends here. They are doing awesome work and supporting so many cool, grassroots initiatives to get more girls on bikes!
You can listen to a few of our favorite moments in the conversation with Kate here:
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