Thursday interval ride...

So Vince over at the shop has been encouraging me for a while to show up for the Thursday evening interval rides. So last night I finally made it out there. I knew it was going to be a tough ride, but as I watched the people showing up in the parking lot, I got an idea of just how tough it would be. First there was the guy who showed up in his race team kit, then there was the group of guys with their triathlon bikes, then there were the guys from my computrainer classes that I knew could push more watts that I could. Did you notice a trend? Yes that's right....a bunch of really strong guys! I contemplated for a minute about just heading across the street for a few loops on the forest preserve....but decided quickly that this would be much better for me. The good thing about the interval ride is that you really can't get dropped from the group. We head out to a section of road about 1 mile long and ride up 1 side of it then do an interval (aka sprint) coming back on the other side. Unfortunately we were doing the interval direction into the wind! About halfway through Bart (a guy I work with at the shop) rolled up along side the group and started yelling "Double!" apparently that meant we got to do interval pace for both directions. It was incredibly painful. But it meant that we switched the direction! So we got to do the last few intervals with the wind at our backs. That definitely felt a little better.

All in all, it was a great workout. After the first few I had no hopes of staying with the guys so luckily there was another girl there that was close to my pace. She was a tiny bit slower than me which actually worked out because if I heard her getting close to me I knew I needed to pick the pace back up. Unfortunately my computer had a dead battery so I have no idea how fast or far I went, and I lost count somewhere in the middle. But I'm pretty sure I did somewhere around 10 laps, and they were all as fast as I could push it. Fast enough that at the end of each interval my legs would shake a bit. Awesome. I plan to keep this up throughout the summer and hopefully get faster each time! The goal is to be able to hang with the guys for at least a few at some point!