Like I Care Dept: What's a Brick?

A brick is a double workout, usually a nice long bike ride followed by a fast run of short to medium length. The purpose is to simulate race conditions of jumping off the bike and running full speed. This is an exercise that pays large dividends, and much like speed work on a track, requires determination.

The body needs to be trained to go from biking to running without much of a warm up, because in a triathlon, this is the most taxing aspect of the race, bar none. More than likely as you progress in training you will undoubtedly train in more than one sport per day, but it's the immediacy between sessions that make a true brick workout.

You can make up your own bricks of back to back events; the transition from swim to bike is more mentally challenging, as your equilibrium will tend to continue to "swim" and you may lose focus (try to pedal away without putting on your bike shoes, for example?), but the bike/run transition leaves most triathletes' legs feeling like cement. But it's wet cement. Whether or not those legs continue to harden into immobility during the course of the run depends on training.