The Brick, or how I learned to love dual sport workouts

Since I'm training for a triathlon this summer I asked my boss who is a seasoned veteran of triathlons for some advice on what I should do to prepare myself. He said as a start he would try to work in one brick workout a week.

As a long time runner and first attempt at a triathlon my first question of course was, "uh whats a brick". I imagined myself having to find two bricks and do curls with them while running or something. Thankfully he explained it's combining two sports into a single workout such as a run followed by a bike.

My boss suggested the Run/Bike workout as a starting point which makes sense to me as I'm already a pretty strong swimmer having swam on the team all through age group and high school. His guideline was to do X miles followed by X minutes of running.

For example:

• 10 mile bike ride followed by 10 minutes of running
• 20 mile bike ride followed by 20 minutes of running

I did 12 mile ride followed by 12 minutes of running today and am starting to really like these. It's a great activity for me to do on my cross training day since it keeps the run short as I work toward my training program for the half marathon in a couple months. The triathlon is 2 weeks after the half marathon so I should be on good shape for my first event I think if I can keep my bike training going.

After 3 weeks of doing one of these a week I feel really good going from bike to run. I've typically been doing these at the gym and hop off the bike and am running on the treadmill within about 20 seconds so that should be an even faster change of sports than during the event transition where I will have to rack my bike and swap shoes to run.

So in trying to keep focused on my half marathon but work toward the triathlon I've been swimming 1200 yards or so on Tuesdays and doing a brick on Thursdays which makes for two nice cross training days.

I'm going to try doing some shorter repeat bricks in a couple weeks and maybe do ride 5 miles run 5 minutes 3 times in a row.

Learning about Triathlon Transitions

I'm signed up for a triathlon this summer so I've been trying to learn about the transitions. This is totally foreign to me since I've only ever done running events. There's all kinds of things I'm apprehensive about. Is it ok to leave my $1300 bike at the transition without supervision? I see people not wearing socks in videos, that seems crazy from my running only background. Should I wear my bike shorts for all 3 legs? Are there water stops on the bike route or do I need to pack several water bottles on the bike.

In my quest to answer some of these questions and the other 100 or so floating around in my head I've found a few decent videos showing transition strategies that are worth watching. Mostly I'm noticing how everyone in the videos is way skinnier than me but hey, I can do this!


Step by Step Triathlon Transitions



Wetsuit and swim leg tips




Flawless Transition tips


Last but not least a little humor

An awesome beginning triathlete reference

This is a great book that I picked up in my quest to do a triathlon this year.  I have so many questions that many of the training books don't answer that all seem to be answered here in a somewhat humorous narrative.

The first review on amazon sums up my thoughts about this book so well I just thought I'd quote it here from user K. A. Stevenson

In this case, I promptly ordered the top 15 triathlon books and virtually ALL of them were written for the seasoned triathlete hoping to shave a few pts. off their time. With the exception of Dave Scott's book, they were written so far above my level of competing, that I was absolutely discouraged and ready to throw in the towel. Even the various websites online (even for beginners) did not offer the kind of information that I was seeking.

And then I finally got to "Slow Fat Triathlete," which answered all my questions (and then some!) in a captivating, somewhat quirky style. It was the "Siren of the Triathlon" and it called to me with every page...

So if your an experienced athlete looking to do a triathlon or someone just starting out this is a great read.  I highly recommend it.  I'm going to show up at the race a lot less nervous for my first time after reading this.  Pickup a copy !

My Ultimate Protein Smoothie

I've been searching for sources of protein as I continue adding more time and frequency to my workouts.  Being pescetarian and not having of fish very often (about once a week) I need to search out other sources of protein to augment my diet, otherwise I feel tired and lack energy during workouts.  I really love the taste of the Naked Juice protein smoothie but it's expensive and I wanted to come up with my own smoothie to save some money.  I've been trying to come up with something similar tasting that had similar nutrition as far as calories/protein/fat and today I think I found a combination I can live with that tastes pretty good.

Ingredients:

1. 3 heaping scoops of Genisoy natrural soy protein powder
   
2. 6 Ice Cubes
3. 1 cup of natural hemp or almond milk
4. 1 banana (freeze to increase coldness/thickness of smoothie)

This ends up tasting pretty good and similar to the Naked Juice except banana flavor instead of coconut flavor.  Nutritionally it ends up getting me where I wanted.  You can reduce some fat and calories by going with almond milk vs the hemp but I only have hemp milk in the fridge right now so I did the values based on that.  The almond milk is 2g less fat per cup and 30 calories less per cup.  The recipe I came up with is below.

Nutritional information for My Ultimate Smoothie:

• Calories: 400 (220 banana, 70 milk product, 110 protein powder)
• Protein: 31g (2g banana, 4g hemp milk, 25g protein powder)
• Fat: 7.5 (1g banana, 5g hemp milk, 1.5g protein powder)

To compare to the Naked Juice it's values are 440 calories, 4g fat, 32g protein.

dailymile

I was going to post all my workouts here but I'm enjoying dailymile.com so much I think I'm just going to post longer thoughts and items here and use dailymile.com for workout blogging. Dailymile.com has some neat features like you can mark how your feeling on your workouts and friends can send you motivation, it's a neat setup.

You can checkout my workouts over on dailymile.com if your interested. If your a dailymile.com user add me as a friend.