What’s a brick, you might ask? Well, I mean most people know what a brick<\/i> is but how does that relate to a triathlon? Fear not gentle readers, I will let you know.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> has the following as claims for origin<\/p>\n Uh huh Matt Brick – you just go on thinking that…. I’m so sure. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, I really need to get that bike time down to about 50 minutes, which would be about 15.4 mph.<\/p>\n 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<\/b> times! Of course I got to fly down that sweet downhill (25 mph+) on Thomas 4 times too….<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.regoarrarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.regoarrarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.regoarrarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.regoarrarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.regoarrarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.regoarrarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.regoarrarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.regoarrarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.regoarrarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n