What’s a brick, you might ask? Well, I mean most people know what a brick is but how does that relate to a triathlon? Fear not gentle readers, I will let you know.

A brick is just doing two workouts back to back – most commonly biking and running (though I have also done running then swimming). Nobody knows for sure why it’s called a brick – it just is. Wikipedia has the following as claims for origin

• A partial anagram of Bike-Run.
• It may simply be a descriptive term for how your legs feel for the first part of the run.
• Another is credited to Mark Sisson and Scott Zagarino (1988), who associated the term brick with the idea of “Just another brick in the wall”… as noted in a song by the group “Pink Floyd”.
• Another association of this term has been claimed to originate from a New Zealand athlete by the name of Matt Brick.

Uh huh Matt Brick – you just go on thinking that…. I’m so sure.

Anyway with my triathlon coming up in 2 weeks, it’s time to do some serious preparation. I have been wanting to get out and do some biking and running outside since that’s much different than a treadmill / exercise bike. And since the triathlon is not ON a treadmill or exercise bike, it seemed prudent. Weather cooperated nicely and away I went.

I opted to just do a 3.05 mile course around my house and do 4 laps of it. That was about 12.2 miles which is about 1/2 mile short of the bike course but close enough. My lap times were: 12:38:33, 12:39:69, 12:54:56, and 13:24:07 for a total time of 51:37:45. Felt pretty good. That’s an average speed of about 14.2 mph which would put me at about 54:15 for my bike course. If I am to achieve my goal of 1:30:00, I really need to get that bike time down to about 50 minutes, which would be about 15.4 mph.

As I rode, I thought about the differences between this route and the race route. One thing I will have in my favor is that there will be less turning and slowing down to check for cars and such. I was not sure about hills. On the one hand, the hills on the Oxford course seemed like they were steeper and/or longer, but on the other hand, every hill I went on (Greenbriar from Miami, Homart from Thomas to Jethve, Sanoma from Osceola to Iuka) I had to go on 4 times! Of course I got to fly down that sweet downhill (25 mph+) on Thomas 4 times too….

The run was hard but satisfying in that I was able to run the whole way. One thing that I thought helped me was that physically the transition between biking and running is very difficult (the aforementioned way that your legs feel after biking). I think that this helped me to keep my pace slow. I just did 2 laps around my block which is 1.62 miles, or a little less than 1/2 my 5K race course. My 2 lap times were 6:58:33 and 6:31:16 for an overall time of 13:29:49, or a pace of an 8:20 mile.

An 8:20 mile is a 5K pace of 25:53 which would be sweet. I wanted to stop and walk several times but kept going. One thing I’ll definitely have to my advantage is that the course I ran today has a few nice hills in it, where the Miami course is fairly flat. Of course I have to run it almost twice as far….