A Lesson from Dreamforce for a Cyclist
For the last three days, my brain and body have not been those of a cyclist.
My brain has been firmly planted in work mode. My body has been walking approximately nine million miles around Moscone Center in San Francisco, sitting in conference sessions, eating at odd times, networking, and even singing karaoke. No bike. No kit. No TrainingPeaks. For three days, I was all in on work at Dreamforce. And, to be honest, being all in on work really energizes me. I like the pace. I like solving problems. I like big ideas and smart people and coming home with my brain overflowing with things I want to try. In a different version of my life—one without Beric, without Sol—I suspect I would have been a pretty serious workaholic.
Spending the week knee deep in learning about the agentic enterprise, moving from probabilistic to deterministic actions, amplifying human capacity, and AI everywhere was pretty mind blowing. There is something incredibly electrifying about being surrounded by people talking about potential—what might be possible, how we might get there, and what tools we now have that could help us do things in revolutionary ways.
Now I’m back home and coming down from the high of Dreamforce, returning to the reality of being a mom. A wife. A professional. And, somewhere, somehow, a cyclist too. It’s got me thinking, how can I keep the energy from Dreamforce when I have all these other things that I need to be?
I spend a lot of time trying to balance those identities and most of the time I feel like I’m really only successfully cosplaying at each of them. Professional Laurie has the laptop backpack, coffee, conference badge, classic white lace-ups, and endless ideas about how AI is finally going to help us crack work-life balance. Mom Laurie has the Hokas, multiple alarms to keep the day moving, Google calendars to keep homework, training, race dates in line, and the uncanny ability to locate an item everyone else has already declared permanently lost. Cyclist Laurie has the kit, helmet, Garmin, TrainingPeaks, and an alarming amount of food stuffed into tiny jersey pockets.
Different costumes for the different versions of me.
Dreamforce got me thinking, have I been looking at it wrong? Maybe I shouldn’t be trying so hard to figure out how to balance it all. Why does pursuing a performance goal in cycling have to live on a different bullet point from my mom goals or my work goals? Maybe instead of constantly deciding how much of myself each one gets, I should be figuring out how all these identities can work together.
Balance asks how to divide ourselves between the things that are important. Synergy (I know such a buzz word) asks how those things can make each other better. After spending three days hearing about breaking down silos, maybe I’ve realized I have a few silos of my own to break down.
This was my first Dreamforce since I started this journey toward becoming a competitive cyclist, and I can say that cycling has certainly changed the person who showed up this week. More specifically, being a DFA2 Racing athlete has given me a very different place to put my ambition.
I’ve spent much of my adult life in a world where working hard is generally attached to an outcome. Where I work, that outcome isn’t always a promotion, a bigger salary, or a new title. It might be the next opportunity, the recognition that comes from completing a successful project, or simply someone seeing that you did a good job. But there is usually some expectation that effort will be rewarded with a win. Put in the effort, learn more, get better, solve bigger problems, and there is usually some version of a podium waiting for you at work.
Over the last several years, cycling has taught me a very different version of ambition because cycling promises me none of that. I can train incredibly hard and still finish exactly where I finish. I can do everything right and have a terrible race. I can get stronger and more consistent without ever getting fast enough to win. Case in point: the 2026 Quick and Dirty mountain bike summer race series. Compared with the same races last year, my average power improved by almost 3%. And the gap between my average and normalized power got smaller. I was putting power down more consistently across the course – by the numbers, my racing legs were more powerful and consistent. And yet in 2025 I finished one spot off the overall podium, while this year I was nowhere near it. I mean, if that isn’t discouraging, I don’t know what is! Getting better doesn’t necessarily mean doing better. There is no promotion waiting for me at the end of the season, and there are certainly no major sponsorships in my future.
And yet, I want to work at it anyway.
After winning Stage 19 of the 2023 Tour de France, Matej Mohorič gave one of the most beautiful post-win interviews I’ve ever heard.
“Every single rider would deserve to win… I wish everyone could win but it’s just not possible, and that’s cruel.”
That has always stuck with me because every rider prepares, every rider works hard, every rider suffers, and there can still only be one winner. That’s sport. The work doesn’t guarantee the reward.
And maybe that’s why cycling has become such an interesting counterpoint to my professional life. At work, I operate with a pretty fundamental belief that the right kind of effort and skill does change the outcome. There is a clear path from problem to solution, and a reasonable expectation that if we follow the path and do the work, we’ll get the result we expect. Dreamforce puts that mindset into hyperdrive. How can we work smarter? What can we improve? What can we automate? How do we take all this potential—in our people, our ideas, and now in AI—and amplify it? Ask the right questions, find the right tools, put in the work, and the better outcomes will follow.
Then I come home to cycling, where the equation is completely different. I have the right coach (she is amazing, Joy McCullough at Big Wheel Coaching!), follow the training plan, fuel properly, recover, improve my equipment, study the course, and work incredibly hard. I can control almost every input and become objectively better at the sport—and still not fully control what happens when I pin on a number. I can do the work. I can chase the potential. I can get better. But none of those things guarantees me a better race result.
At first those seem like competing ideas. The more I think about them, though, the more I wonder if the real superpower might be found in putting them together. Maybe I can show up better for Beric, and be better on this team, if I can learn to fully understand and embody both.
Being Beric’s DFA2 Racing soigneur, and biggest fan means believing completely in his potential. It means helping him find opportunities, removing obstacles where I can, carrying the extra bag, standing beside him at the start line, and giving him every opportunity to find out just how good he can become. That’s the professional in me: see the potential, find the tools, solve the problems, create the opportunity.
Being a DFA2 Racing athlete also means knowing that we can train and study and gain race experience to create the best possible opportunity, but we can never guarantee the outcome. Marc Benioff might say racing is stubbornly probabilistic. We can do everything we can to improve the odds, but we can never make the result deterministic.
Beric can train perfectly and have a terrible day. He can make the right move and still get beaten. He can be stronger than he’s ever been and discover that someone else is stronger still. The cyclist in me understands that in a way I don’t think the Professional Laurie ever could. Cycling Laurie knows you do the work without believing the work owes you anything.
So maybe these different identities aren’t things I need to balance after all. Maybe they’re things I need to bring together. Work has taught me to see potential and ask what I can do to help unlock it. Cycling has taught me that potential doesn’t come with promises. And being Beric’s mom and teammate asks me to somehow hold both ideas at the same time.
I believe enormously in what might be possible for him, and as his mom, I will always support him in the pursuit of his dreams. With DFA2 Racing, I want to help create the opportunities, solve the problems, remove the obstacles I can, and stand beside him at as many start lines as he’ll let me. But I also understand that none of that work is a contract with the universe promising a particular result. Cycling can be cruel that way.
So what did three days at Dreamforce have to do with me being a cyclist? I think it comes down to one thing: uncertainty. At work, uncertainty is something I instinctively want to reduce. I want more information, better tools, smarter systems, and a clearer path from the problem in front of me to the outcome we’re trying to create. Much of what excited me at Dreamforce was about exactly that—using new technology to make what was once probabilistic more deterministic.
Cycling has taught me a completely different relationship with uncertainty. I can train, study, prepare, and gain experience. I can get stronger and smarter and do everything possible to improve my odds. But I can never engineer the uncertainty out of racing. At some point, I have to pin on a number and find out what happens.
And maybe that’s where all these versions of me finally stop competing with each other. The professional in me will probably always want to solve the uncertainty. The cyclist in me is learning to be excited by it. And the mom in me is striving to help Beric prepare for everything we can control while giving him the space to discover everything we can’t.
Maybe the professional, the mom, and the cyclist can all agree on this: believe in the potential, do everything you can to explore it, and find enough joy in the pursuit that the outcome never has to be the whole point.