I think a key thing to being successful in these races is to enjoy your own company. You spend so many hours cycling alone that if you don’t you’re going to have a pretty miserable time.
I sometimes listen to music, audio books, or podcasts whilst cycling, but generally there’s always something to look at or something to think about. Cycling itself is usually quite a meditative action (something to do with inducing transient hypofrontality I think?!), which allows you escape into a slightly different, calmer mindset.
One aspect that I don’t particularly enjoy is calculating times and distances in my head - it can be a special kind of torture, especially when tired. I've discovered a hack for this whereby I use Siri to do the conversions for me, which enables me to trundle on, trying to think about nothing in particular.
