Reality check!

Today I renewed my racing license for the upcoming season. Which made me realize that the season is just around the corner and I while I feel pretty good, I still feel like I'm way behind where I need to be. What made me realize this even more was that I finally bought and finished reading that cyclist training bible book by the Friel guy. It kind of made me feel like I wasted all these past winter training months.
In the past I've always just trained how I felt. If I felt like going fast then I went fast. There was no organization, rhyme or reason to my workouts. I just got on the bike and rode. I pretty much let whoever was riding around me that day dictate what I was going to be doing. Sometimes, this can be a great motivational tool, and other times it can make for really inefficient training. Falling victim to the junk miles routine because I didn't have anyone to ride with.
The more I read and re-read the book, the more knowledgeable I feel, but I also feel like knowing this much information and terms and numbers and compiling this much data takes a lot of fun out of the sport for me. I feel as though if I'm going to be good at riding a bike then I have to become a student of riding the bike, so I should be reading all these books and crunching all these numbers figuring out what the square root of my lactate threshold is divided by the maximum mean of my VO2 max subtracted from the 1mm leg length discrepency I have to figure out my power output as I suck wheels down at Hains Point.
I guess I need to find the balance between just riding, and riding with a purpose. I want to win and I'm super competitive so I try and use that as motivation when I ride. Any other information I have going on in my head is just a distraction from my ultimate goal, and that's winning.