Building with Bricks

Brick session on the plan for the Front Runner squad tomorrow. The next round of the local triathlon series is coming up in a week and it is another sprint distance and so now is a great time for the squad to be putting a bit of polish in the transitions.

When we do transition practice with Front Runner we do it in the form of what I call a multi-brick. A multi-brick is a session where you do a short bike leg and a short run leg over and over. The idea is that the short legs mean you are doing multiple transitions so you get lots of practice. You are also doing the transitions at race speed and whilst fatigued, so it gives you lots of practice under race conditions. The brick loop we use is a 4km bike and a 1km run, which works well because it is expandable to suit numerous race distances. Do the loop 5 times and you have a Sprint Distance, do 10 times and you have an Olympic etc. You get the idea.

 If I am honest is a session that I have blatantly stolen from Daryl Stanley, my old coach. Back when I did the session with Daryl we used to do it at a local velodrome, so it was a great safe environment in which to really dial in your transitions. Whilst we don't use a velodrome for our session, we do our sessions in a similarly safe location. These safe locations mean people can really focus on their skills. In fact it was one of these sessions where I first learnt to mount my bike with the shoes already clipped to the pedals. Skills like mounting with shoes in the pedals (and dismounting) is exactly what this session is so good at working on. Getting everyone mounting smoothly is one of the objectives I set myself for this sort of session. Whether or not they use the skills in their next race is up to them, but at least they have had a chance to practice the skills.

The plan for the session tomorrow will be for us to do the brick for 70 minutes which means nearly everyone will get 5 repeats done and the speedier guys will get 6 or 7. If that sounds kind of painful, then you wouldn't be wrong. While the session is great for working on skills, it is also a very effective training session.

With such short legs you find that people tend to go very hard (even if you warn them not too). This means that people tend to be pushing near their threshold for the entire time. As such, the brick session has a habit of being a real gut buster. This is another way in which the session is a good simulation for Sprint Distance racing, which is more or less foot to the floor racing. Despite the toughness of the session it always tends to be quite popular. I think the opportunity to work hard, practice skills and get in some very race specific training seems to appeal to people.

All up it should be a good morning out.

Hopefully nobody throws up this time....