How does everyone balance doing brick workouts with bike- or run-only hard workouts? More bricks the closer you get to your “A” race? All bricks all the time?
As a side question, this issue came up for as I was trying to figure out what types of hard workouts I should be doing (I’m in the build period for Oly races). I generally have 3 types I like to do:
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2x20 at around LT,
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shorter/harder intervals like 3/2s on the bike or 800m track intervals, and
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bike-run brick, eg. 60min bike with sustained hard efforts followed by 20-40 minutes of fairly hard running
I don’t think I can fit all 3 of these in one week and be able to recover - I’m not sure how to balance them. THanks for any suggestions.
I’m still playing around with my schedule - but I’m changing to a 2 week block and try to get 6 “hard” work-outs in:
LSD bike, LSD run, bike intervals (2x20LT), run intervals (800 repeats), long brick like 40 mile bike/8 mile run at a bit below half IM effort, and short brick (2x20 LT in an hour CT work-out) followed by a 35 min hard run.
Still experimenting…but consider a longer workout “week”…
Dave
you don’t have to do a brick in the traditional sense of the word. I know many of the pro’s don’t do bricks as discussed here more than a couple of times per year.
They do many transitional runs. get off the bike and run and easy 2-5miles. This allows you to have a quality bike session and get off and run w/out trashing yourself.
If you really want to run fast, go to the track when your fresh and run fast. 1-2k even 1.5 mile repeats for threshold and 200-800’s for speed. Get to the point where you can hold say 16x400 @ 1:15 on the 2 min. adjust this pace to suit your needs.
'ells bells…if I didn’t do a ton of bricks I wouldn’t have anything in my training log!
it’s like this, though: I’m trying to accomplish my scheduled workouts in two periods, generally early morning and in the afternoon. the weekday riding is my bike commute, and I have routes from 6.5 to 22mi each way at my disposal depending on what the plan is (speedwork, EZ, “long” cruising, etc). I have routes from 1.5 to 4mi each way to either one of two pools (indoor and outdoor) from my shower-equipped office building where I arrive after my morning ride…so it’s natural and/or convenient to run to and from my swim and get a “cheap” 5k in at a minimum. If I’m not swimming, I just head out for whatever I need to make the scheduled run distance.
In the end, these are primarily transitional efforts as was mentioned earlier…not threshold bricks. One of the two (or sometimes three) disciplines will often be a steady or tempo effort, and once a week (today, in fact) I’ll do something like this: 15mi bike with 5x1:30 AT efforts on 0:30 rest, followed by a 10k run including 2x1.0mi hard on 0.5mi rest. The afternoon commute will be either 15 or 20mi including the same speedwork as this morning, but no run afterwards. Tomorrow will be an easy day: 7mi commute, 5k run split in half by a swim workout (all morning) and then 7mi commute home.
Anything not explicitly labeled hard or AT is done at a recovery pace…and that’s the important part. The really important part. My coach and I have found that I thrive on this kind of workout (my June log shows 16 du- or tri-bricks so far) and the race results are backing it up.
YMMV, as always. This is not for everybody…but just to show it can be done to good effect.
Thanks everyone - great stuff. I think I’ll stick to the longer (10-20min intervals) for now and wait until August for the shorter ones. I have races 8/1, 8/15, and 8/29 with the last being my A race… seems like a good time to transition from a build phase to a peak.