She's a Brick (House)

Brick, n. (def): something hard that hurts when it falls on you.

Everyone who intends to do a triathlon of any distance must endure the fun and frivolity of doing a brick workout on occassion. A "brick" is a bike ride followed immediately by a run (the word "immediately" has lots of definitions in and of itself, depending on whether I am asking the Patient Spouse to take out the garbage or whether the doctor will see you immediately...but we generally mean as soon as you can change your shoes and dump your bike helmet).

The term brick comes from somewhere, no one is sure where, and means either "bike-run-in combination (the "k" being an extra letter which I am sure stands for Kicks Your Rear)" or "bike-run-ICK!" Or maybe something else. Wherever it came from, triathletes know what it means.

You can also do a swim-bike brick (which cannot possibly stand for bike-run, but for some reason, it's still a brick) or even a reverse brick (run-bike, or bike-swim), or even a swim-run, or run-swim, or for goodness sakes, throw in a tennis game in the middle if you want and call it a trick. Biking right after a swim is for some reason not as obnoxious to the body as running right after a bike. Although I will suggest you try some brief running right after swimming because you will be doing exactly that on your way to transition, and the sudden change in atmosphere from horizontal water baby to standing up running person can create vertigo, along with weird sounds coming out of your mouth as you try to balance.

What a brick does is teach your body to start running immediately after it's been pedaling in circles while you have been sitting down. For some reason, your legs will tell that this is not an acceptable thing. They got used to spinning around and being weightless, and now you are asking them to carry the load up a hill and around some corners, and they won't be happy with the request.

Jef Mallet, a funny writer for Triathlete magazine, who has also published a funny book on triathlons (I recommend it), calls doing bricks a needed exercise to make your body go from saying "what the heck is this?" to "oh, this again." Your body needs to learn to adjust from biking to running by storing the feeling in muscle memory so that you don't immediately plant your face on the concrete at your first tri. Because your legs will totally feel like Gumby parts when you start off after a bike ride, and you have to convince them that you really mean it when you say you are going to run now.

It takes a few minutes to get your legs accustomed to the run. How long depends on many factors, including how long your bike was, how hard your bike was, how much training you have done, and whether you remembered to take off your bike shoes and put on your running shoes. Seriously, when you reach the dismount area for the bike (and there will be signs and volunteers yelling at you to "GET OFF YOUR BIKE HERE!") you will have to run with your bike to your transition spot, so it's a good chance to wake up your legs right then and tell them the running is going to start. Even if all you can do is a shuffle jog while wheeling your bike next to you, it's a good wake up call.

I find for me that I tend to go out way too fast on the run (a lot of triathletes have the opposite problem) because my legs were used to turning over fast on the bike, and they want to turn over fast on the run. Not a bad thing except for a longer run I will wear out quickly at that pace. I have to force myself to slow down and take it easy until I get the running rhythm down. Usually, that takes me about 1/4-1/2 mile.

One hint that a lot of articles propose is to start spinning your legs in an easy gear on the bike about a mile before your dismount, or to unclip them and shake them out one by one to get the blood flowing. I've not been too successful with this as every tri I have ever done has had the last mile of the bike on an incredibly steep uphill, so spinning easy is just not going to happen, and if I unclipped during an uphill I will be on the concrete face plant issue well before I start the run. But if you have a flat or downhill finish, this is a good thought.

Bricks are not meant to be done every week, although I have read that it's never a bad idea to run about one minute after every bike ride (unless you bring a shoe change, this is a clunky run, keep in mind) to keep your body aware of this possibility.

Last night the Patient Spouse and I headed out for a brick in the 102 (I checked two different thermometers) degree heat. The 15 mile, one hour bike wasn't so bad. But once we got off and started running in the now 101 degree heat at 7:40 p.m., it was miserable. There was no breeze and the heat index was 109. I wanted to run a full 3 miles but after 1.5 miles I decided that if God had intended me to run in this kind of weather he would have made us with portable, internal, air conditioning systems that could be switched to "high." So we stopped after 1.5 miles (around 11:20 min mile) and I dove directly into the pool without stopping go (I did remove my shoes and socks first). I griped a lot about the cost of putting in that pool 3 years ago, but last night it was worth every single penny.

Tonight is a fairly short swim, but I see my coach has me up to doing intervals on both bike and run the next couple of days. It's supposed to cool off to only 100 degrees this week so hey, I'm up for it!