Sara, I will pile on to all the great feedback above. One of the many great aspects of cycling is the tidal wave of positive reinforcement early on... watching the scale drop almost daily, moving further up in your group every week, changing to a faster group monthly. It is intoxicating. Well, inevitably, the gains become smaller, and harder to achieve. That can be depressing. And we've all seen people give up on cycling and move on to something else where they can experience that addicting growth curve again. That is one of the primary reasons I like the racing community, despite not being hyper-competitive: it forces me to strive for that continuous improvement even when the effort required becomes much harder and the incremental gains much smaller. Put in perspective, the 1% gains later on should be every bit as rewarding as those massive percentage gains when you first started cycling.