All right, let me start today's episode with this story. A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I were out on a bike ride.

We live in an area that's well known for the amount of road bikers that are attacking the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

And while we look pretty darn close to sea level, within a few miles, you can find yourself on a gradual climb that will slowly but surely make your thighs burn, but it's not bad enough that you necessarily

want to stop, or you can find yourself on a short climb so steep that your heart is beating

out of your chest and you can feel it in your head. And you seriously just want to jump off your

bike and walk it up the hill, which I've felt like doing so many times. Now my wife is the cyclist

and the runner and the swimmer, for that matter, and I have been the runner, period. But over the last year or so, we've gone out almost every Saturday for anywhere from an hour and a half to a three-hour bike ride, and it has been an absolute blast. I take back all the things I've said about cyclists over the years. And yeah, I have the padded shorts and the bike shirts with

the pockets in the back and all of those things. And I think I definitely can look the part. But again,

my wife is the one that has done the century rides or the 100 mile rides as well as a double

century or 200 mile ride. And the longer and longer we go in hopes of preparing me for my own

century or two, I find that no matter how

padded my seat is, my bottom at some point just is not a fan of being on the bike for hours and

hours. But I'll get there. But anyway, back to the story. So we hit a particularly difficult, a very

short hill in the area called Chili Hill. And again, it was hard, short but hard. And when we

crested the top, we stopped for a quick drink,

and we were going to admire the scenery and take a picture, because of course, in this day and age, if you do not have a picture, then it perhaps never happened. But I was still huffing and I was puffing. And when she said, where do you want to go from here? I asked about the various routes home. and when she laid out three different routes to get back,

there was basically an easy route, a medium route, or a hard route. And so I said that I felt like we had done amazing. We had done so well that why didn't we just take the easy route home? We had plenty going on that afternoon, and we had just killed ourselves up Chili Hill. So, yeah, let's definitely go the easy route home. So the next two miles were downhill, and it was just fun. The wind was cooling us off. I think I'm cracking jokes. And when we finally got to a stop sign, it was literally a point where left was easy. And then if we turned right, then there were the medium and the hard routes. And so I said, I don't know, what would you think about going the medium route home? And she said, sure, more downhill. We went from there. And then there was a proverbial and literal fork in the road. And she pulls up beside me. She said, right is the medium route and left is the hard route. And at this point, we're going downhill. I was feeling great. And so I said, you good if we go left and just go ahead and take the harder route home? And she said, sure. And we did it. And it was really hard. It was really hard. But when we were finally on this home stretch with all the hard work done and dusted, it was all behind us, she said, you know, you just validated what I've heard before and what I've shared with you in different scenarios that you never make a hard decision when you're on the uphill. You wait till things level out a bit, or better yet, when you have some downhill

momentum going. And the more I thought about it, I thought that my wife was spot on, that when my heart

was beating out of my chest and I could hear it in my ears or feel it in my ears and my head,

that I was absolutely happy to say that we did it and let's cruise home and we could feel good about ourselves. But when we were on that flat road or the downhill, I felt like I was good to take on a few more difficult challenges. And by the time we got home, I had pushed myself on the bike harder than I ever had before, which raised the heck out of my emotional baseline. And there was definitely more of a sense of a comp flowing through my veins, and not to mention a bit more kicking the backside to father time as we were able to add a good workout, well, both of us now in the over 50 category of age, knowing that those workouts really do matter with us both having a value-based goal of wanting to be around as long as we can so we can spoil some grandkids that are going to come along at some point. So coming up on today's

episode, we are going to dig into a study or two about decision-making. Is there a better time

to make a decision? And we're also going to talk about do morning people or evening people

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