Three Short Bricks & An Ab Workout

Posted by Steve ()

January 3, 2008

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Tonight’s workout made a very pleasant change and turned out to be quite a challenge. I needed to run tonight and I also needed to ride my bike, so I decided to combine the two activities and perform three short “bricks”. For those not aware of the terminology, a brick is a combination “bike/run” and is useful for triathletes and duathletes who need to run after a bike leg of their chosen multi-sport event. If you’ve ever tried to run (and run fast) after riding your bike, you’ll understand the need to practice the transition from pedaling to putting one foot in front of the other.

I started with 10 minutes on the bike trainer, switching from easy gears (the small chainring) to harder gears (the big chainring). In no time at all it was time to jump off my bike, lace up my running shoes and hop onto the treadmill for 10 minutes of progressive running. I set the incline to 1% (I never run at 0%) and gradually ramped up the speed until the 10th minute where I eased off slightly and prepared myself for another session on the bike.

I repeated the 2 x 10 minutes three times to finish with a solid hour of exercise and a beneficial workout for my planned duathlon in March. I recognize I have a lot of work to do on the bike, but the treadmill running felt really good tonight, almost to the point I was holding myself back. Very encouraging….

After grabbing a quick drink of water, I decided to take the opportunity to complete Week 2 of my Essential Abs program. I’ll probably begin Week 3 on Sunday afternoon which will give me a couple of days to recover from this weeks core work.

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