The cyclocross season has ended, and another year traveling with the Aspire Racing crew is in the books. It’s bee a crazy ride—I counted 14 beds slept in over the course of the last month of traveling, and I can safely say that I can’t wait to be somewhat unpacked and in one place for a few weeks. (OK, four weeks. But for me, that’s an eternity!)
But I digress.
As we were talking about the season, the team mechanic Tom Hopper and I were chatting with Ellen Noble, who just had the season of a lifetime, taking silver medal at Worlds. Now that the season is over, we could finally say, without fear of jinxing anything, that she had phenomenal luck with no major mechanicals. But Tom said something that caught my ear, and synced up perfectly with my one-word resolution.
“Luck favors the prepared,” he said. And I realized that was a) true, and b) the crux of what I wanted my New Year’s Resolution to encompass. I talked about the idea of being “collected,” as my one-word overarching theme for the year, and when Tom said that, it was like a light went off in my head.
I love this, especially looking back at the season as a whole, and my last year of travels. I’ve been extremely lucky to have such great jobs that I love doing, from writing for a few different magazines (yay, Bicycling!) to putting out two books this year to coordinating a season for a team that I love. (And planning a wedding, traveling a ton, and then staying happily married despite the ridiculous schedule.)
It wasn’t really luck though—or, at least, not all luck. I’ve been prepared. Whether it’s prepared to turn around a fast-writeup assignment at 10PM in Europe because it’s still work hours in the US, or prepared with a protein shake at the right time, or prepared with all of our flights and hotels meticulously booked and an agenda that lays everything out including the location of a printer in Girona to print said airline tickets (seriously, RyanAir?). I’ve realized, largely thanks to the role I’ve played with Aspire, that being as prepared as humanly possible (“obsessively detail oriented,” is how Ellen put it) is what’s gotten me through not just this season, but through all of my other jobs writing as well.
You don’t get lucky just because. You get lucky because you prepared and you were ready so luck could strike.
