So often, when I try to hit the first note of a bar, I end up landing slightly ahead of time.  This wouldn't be a bad thing, except when it happens at the beginning of a section that I will be looping. For instance, my kick drums and bass notes, which are supposed to land on the downbeat, almost always land in the last couple ticks of the previous measure, putting them outside the loop area.  I then have to manually edit their start times to get them to start inside the loop.
 
Does this happen to you guys too?  Are there ways to reduce the amount of time we spend fixing that are intended to hit at the start of loops?

Maybe you are just that good.............
 
Seriously though.  Try recording a track with the "PDC" button lit.   This will temporarily disable Plugin Delay Compensation.  Maybe something weird is going on with one of your plugins.  You could also try recording a track with the "FX" button lit as well, to temporarily disable fx.

Just wondering what your are recording ?  when you say a couple ticks
are you referring to midi?  if you are only a couple ticks out , you are amazing. :)
     It is a natural thing to push the beat , drums , bass , almost anything ,
I am mostly a guitar player , even on acoustic strumming , I start just a touch early on the beat.
   Not sure if that is what you were looking for :)
 
 

input quantitize?

If the note is played on your controller then then it's not unreasonable to have those notes land anywhere before or after the place it will belong. You then quantize the track and the notes will be put in the correct place. 
 
If your driver is not reporting the offset correctly then the timing can be out from what you are playing along with. 
 
Do a loop back test to see if your driver is reporting the correct offset. 
Patch the output back to an input and re -record a drum part. example shown below. 
Notice how in ASO mode the re recorded track is early, This would be why you would have this issue... your hearing your backing tracks ahead of time so you put the note there. 
 

 
Track 1 MIDI drum part
Track 2 Audio frozen to session drummer ( note it lines up perfectly) 
track 3 ASIO re recorded track normal buffer
track 4 ASIO re recorded track highest buffer 
track 5 WDM mode - notice WDM is real late. 
 
 

It happens to me with only the metronome going so I don't think it's a synth or plugin delay. I don't think it's so much of a Sonar issue as maybe a side effect of playing (bowing) a double bass. It takes a little time and bow movement for it to actually produce sound. All-in-all it's more likely that I'm just rushing a little.

I'm dealing with MIDI.  I have my resolution set to 120 ticks per beat, and I often land on beat or 120 (which is different from beat 0 of the following measure).  This doesn't mean I am "good", but rather "unlucky", since if I could get the notes to land shortly after the start of the measure I wouldn't have to edit them.
 
I always quantize, but never with 100% strength; it's most like 50% or 75%.  So if the initial note landed before the start of the measure, even with quantize it ends up being too early to be included in a loop.
 
I think part of my "problem" is like DrLumen's; I played brass for many years in school, so am used to always trying to start playing notes a tiny bit early.  Even on piano I tend to do that, rushing a little. 
 
I just wish I could write a CAL script which would look for notes which *almost* land on the first beat of the measure, and then quantize those notes so that they always occur after the start of the measure rather than before.  Is it possible to do that with CAL?  Been a while since I read the specs...

Definitely possible to do with CAL. Or you can use Edit > Select By Filter, set both Min and Max Beat = 4 (for 4/4 time) Min/Max Tick = 116/119 (for example), and quantize those to 100%. Start by selecting the whole track so that Select By Filter has something to work on.