How To Nail The Triathlon Brick Session

Brick sessions are a staple – albeit testing – session in every triathletes training armory. But how should you go about planning them, and what sort of Brick sessions should you do? Brian Meltzer has a few ideas.

Written By Brian Meltzer
The key to running fast in a short-course triathlon isn’t just training your body to run faster; it’s also training yourself to run fast off the bike. They might sound like similar concepts, but they’re entirely different in practise.

Assuming you’ve built a strong aerobic base with long rides and moderately long runs and perhaps dabbled with sport-specific intervals to fine-tune each discipline’s fitness, you need to spend a lot of time during your race season concentrating on bike-to-run workouts.

It’s common knowledge that you can help your run by not pushing big gears and instead riding with a high cadence that might match the cadence of your desired run pace. But the real key to getting your fatigued leg muscles to fire unimpeded the moment you get off the bike in a race is to simulate in a progression of brick workouts the same rpm’s and wattage you’ll be putting out during the ride and the run.

Practically speaking, you need to diversify your bricks by mixing up the intervals to match the varying intensities and the level of fatigue you’ll encounter in the race.

To condition himself for the constantly changing bike pace and wattage demands in draft-legal ITU World Cup races, Boulder-based pro and 2008 U.S. Olympian Matt Reed alternates between short and fast reps on a bike trainer and a treadmill. After warming up, he’ll start spinning at a moderate output and then his coach (and wife) Kelly Reed will call out a higher wattage plateau and how long he’ll need to hold it. For example, she might say “600 watts for 45 seconds” or “400 watts for 90 seconds” and he’ll up his intensity for that duration before settling back into a moderate spinning output.

In a typical workout, he might do 12 to 15 reps of varying durations and intensities before jumping off the bike and running a kilometer on his treadmill at 5K to 10K race pace.

“Just as if it were in a race, Matt has no idea what to expect,” she says, adding that he’ll usually do two ride-run sets during that workout. “All he knows is that he’s going to be jumping off and running. If Matt’s jumping off the bike in a race, he might or might not be dictating the pace. So he needs to know exactly what pace he can run that first kilometre at after having just ridden at 400 or 500 or 600watts. And the key to that first kilometre is good high-cadence leg turnover.”

The same concept can apply to age groupers in a crowded non-drafting race, such as the London Triathlon, where you might be constantly getting out of the saddle and pumping big wattage to pass slower riders or avoid sitting in someone’s draft, only to tuck back into an aero position and settle into a more maintainable, lower-output rhythm.

Leading up to an Olympic-distance event, Kelly Reed recommends doing a progression of bricks, like the following, that increase in intensity and specificity over six to eight weeks:

Brick 1
Start off with a basic brick by cutting down a typical two-hour ride to 90 minutes and then running 30 minutes at an easy to moderate pace.

Brick 2
As your training progresses, ride for about 80 to 90 minutes and then run 10 to 15 minutes at 5K race pace, followed by 10 to 15 minutes at 10K race pace.

Brick 3
Ride 60 to 75 minutes at a higher intensity and again run 10 to 15 minutes at 5K race pace followed by 10 to 15 minutes at 10K race pace.

Brick 4
In the weeks leading up to your race, simulate the course in your brick workouts. “For example, if you’ll be in an aero position for the last several miles of the bike and then there’s a big hill a half mile into the run course, make sure you’re doing that in your brick,” Kelly Reed says. “If you don’t do it in training, your body isn’t going to be able to react in the race.”

Brian Metzler is a running coach, age-group triathlete and senior editor at Running Times.

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