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.