Brenda Mays is back on the road again.

After a career-highlight performance in barrel racing at last month’s National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas — Mays won the average for the first time in six trips to the NFR — the 44-year-old Terrebonne resident took some time off over the holidays.

But there is little rest in the rodeo life. After the holidays were over Mays flew to Arizona and spent a couple of weeks prepping herself and her horses in Morristown, near Phoenix. She is expecting to kick off her 2012-13 season at a rodeo in Denver this weekend. (Qualification for the NFR starts in October and concludes in September each year.)

“Now it’s a new year,” Mays said recently by phone from Arizona. “I’ve had a couple weeks to kind of let it soak in, and now it’s time to take the next step and get ready for another one.”

At the NFR, Mays was not necessarily flashy — she, with her quarter horse Jethrow, placed in only two of the 10 go-rounds and in no round placed better than a fourth-place tie — but she rode cleanly and consistently, something none of her 14 finals challengers could say they did as well in 2012.

“This year is one of those years where I was the only one to leave all the barrels up all 10 rounds, and it worked out really good,” noted Mays, who earned almost $56,000 at the NFR and almost $138,000 for the season.

The significance of her accomplishment is not lost on Mays, who ended up seventh in the world standings for the season.

“To come away with winning the average at the NFR, that just means that you were the best for that rodeo,” explained Mays, the married mother of a teenage son. “It means a lot.”

Unlike some professional sports, rodeo competitors typically pay their own way to compete. The money Mays earned at the finals, she noted, will go toward costs such as horse care and transportation.

“I’ll take that,” Mays said about her NFR earnings. “That pays some bills, and it kind of gets me set up so I can kind of go this next year.”

Also unlike a number of other sports, barrel racing is not just a young woman’s game. Two of Mays’ competitors last month were in their 50s, and one of them, 53-year-old Mary Walker, emerged as world champion in her first NFR. If Walker and Lee Ann Rust, who turned 55 on the last day of the finals and also was an NFR rookie, can serve as any indication, Mays has plenty of barrel racing ahead of her.

“It just goes to show, it doesn’t matter what your age is,” Mays observed. “You have a good horse and you’ve got the ability to ride it, you can accomplish whatever.”

Still, Mays works at it. She keeps herself conditioned by working out with a personal trainer when she is at home in Terrebonne, and she said that out of the two weeks she spent in Las Vegas, she missed working out on only two days. Since early September, she has lost 15 pounds and has kept them off. And even in Arizona, she has been going on runs to the post office located about a mile away, and she takes along weights and resistance bands to train with. She also maintains a relatively strict diet when training.

Other than a mid-February return to Central Oregon to watch her son, Kyle, compete in his high school district wrestling tournament, Mays expects to be on the road until well into spring. (Kyle has traveled with Mays often in the past, she said, but he is currently in Terrebonne with Mays’ husband, Andy Easterly.) Along with three horses, including Jethro, Mays is traveling with a dog and a cat, and her parents have also been with her in Arizona. Her mom, Lynne Mays, is a former barrel racer and a frequent travel companion.

Some of the more prominent rodeos the younger Mays said she expects to contest this winter, besides the one in Denver, are in Fort Worth, San Antonio, Houston, and San Angelo, all in Texas, and likely one in Jackson, Miss.

“I’m going to go and do the best I can this winter. Then we kind of see where we’re at,” Mays said. “The goal is always to make the finals. I mean, that’s always a goal.”

And so begins another rodeo season for Brenda Mays. She’s not done yet.

“I want to be the best I can be and achieve my goals,” Mays said. “I’m going to keep trying it.”