Why not take a traffic cone with you?

Tonight's workout was a fast interval bike ride that was a special request by my friend Britt, the traffic cone!  Britt is training for Ironman Wisconsin in 9 weeks and normally doesn't dress like a traffic cone but today was a special day and she did! She works with a coach and gets workouts every week and sometimes asks for company on them. 

Is that a traffic cone? Nope, just Britt!

Her coach had prescribed 8 x 5 min at hard effort with a 2 min recovery between.  Kyla, AJ, and I all were able to join her and none of us has been doing interval work on the bike that much.  One thing is for certain with interval workouts...they are always easier when you have company and you always work harder when you have company pushing you.  Another thing that might be certain is how sore we will all be tomorrow!

Really, my friends aren't in the Witness Protection Program. I swear!

We started out by riding through town as our warmup.  We decided that once we passed the Home Office we would be on roads that would be okay to start our intervals.  Truly we were still in town in some neighborhoods so our first 2 intervals were a little slower since we had hills, turns, and stops to navigate. 

Speed over time...you can see a definite jump during the hard efforts. Some hills were thrown into the 1st two which is why I didn't hold consistent speed on them.

Once we were out on the highway it was much easier to do the intervals.  We had a nice wide shoulder to work with and the road is mostly flat with very small inclines.  We did 3 more intervals heading out of town so that we would only have to do 3 intervals once we turned to head back.  This helped us so that our final interval didn't have to be in a neighborhood!

Overall, the intervals were tough especially when we had a headwind.  Just before our turnaround, we saw a friend of mine pass by. He and his riding partner had a minute or two headstart on us and I wanted so very bad to catch them.  It took all three intervals that we had left to do it, but Kyla and I did finally catch them with 1 minute to go on our very last interval! Persistence pays off!

One thing I didn't like about the ride was that there wasn't any time to be social.  During the intervals we were all working way too hard to try and have a conversation.  And 2 minutes recovery time isn't enough time to tell a complete story.  We were all so glad to be done with the hard efforts and we took a nice leisurely pace to finish up the remaining 6 miles. 

We finished up at the Bentonville square and met up with some of our running friends for dinner outside.  They had already finished up eating by the time we got there.  We made it to the coffee shop with 10 minutes to spare before they closed.  Just enough time to order a sandwich and lemonade.  It was nice to sit outside for a few minutes and catch up with friends.