Jen likes the bike.

Last week my schedule just so happened to have three fairly hard bike workouts that fell on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Well, T/Th are the Tri Scottsdale group rides, that consists of 35-50 super fast dudes and a few girls (when I say a few I really do mean three – although today we had five or six). They ride hard and I wasn’t sure if I could keep up, but I had my game plan, which consisted of holding on for dear life and never losing site of someone’s wheel.

I could give you a play by play, but do you really want to read all about my rides? Yeah, I didn’t think so ☺ SOOOO here is a synopsis… I hung on for dear life the entire ride, I was never dropped and I loved every minute of the ride – especially because it hurt so good. The more comfortable I can get dealing with painful, heart pounding through my chest, lungs exploding, lactic acid induced workouts get me one step closer to my ability to push in races.

If you read my blog you know about my long run debacle last Saturday and how I was worried it would ruin my ability to bike hard on Sunday during my hilly long ride. Let me just say that Salt Stick is my new BFF, I took in about 1000mg of salt each hour during the ride, but I was hurting from Saturday. Yeah – I know my ability to recover and I just wasn’t 100% yet. A group of us, Lisa, Jayson, Joey, Maureen and I climbed in and out of Bartlett. I was suffering by the time we got to the lake and it didn’t help that the first 3 miles were up a steep grade where we averaged 7.5-8mph with no breeze in sight the gnats would NOT leave us alone!!! At one point Lisa and I were riding together, we encountered a bit of a head wind on an uphill and we couldn’t complain. It was just great to get a little bit of a breeze!

Are you still puzzled at why my blog post is called “Jen likes the bike”? My good friend Marc named it that because I had three hard bike rides on tap last week! I got in some good miles with hard efforts and he felt it was an appropriate title ☺

What is funny about Marc naming my blog post is that many of my friends talk about Coach Jen like she is someone they know. I am a slave to my training schedule and am lucky to have friends who will train with me and do MY/JEN’s workouts with me. I am known to tell my friends that if they can’t be ON for the workout then they shouldn’t join me – aren’t I a great friend?!? I have also told them to go home when they are complaining. I don’t like complainers – especially when the workout prescribed is HARD! It’s going to HURT and I don’t need any extra negativity, it takes all my extra energy to be positive when I am dying. I can get mean too, a couple of my friends are scared of the wrath of Elizabeth, so they just keep quiet. Sometimes they will show up and say, “what does Jen have us doing today” or “you can tell Jen I hate her” or “will Jen REALLY know if you don’t do the workout exactly as she tells you too? I won’t tell anyone!” I can’t help but laugh. Jen has become a household name with my friends.

*** I always do the workouts the way they are supposed to be done, except for when I don’t interpret them correctly ;-) ***
Maybe my next post will be “Jen likes rest week.” Because that is what I am in this week! At the end of rest week I get to race a sprint triathlon and hopefully hop back into hard training.