THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY

This weekend I tried my first "brick" workout. A "brick" is when you combine two different workouts consecutively, in preparation for the transition you would have to make in a triathlon. The most common brick workout consists of a medium bike ride followed by a short to medium length run, with little or no transition time between the workouts. This format teaches your body to adapt to the metabolic and other physiological requirements (like complicated muscle recruitment!) which arise from that sequence of specific events in a long endurance race. In other words, after spinning your legs in circles on a bicycle for several miles, it is kind of hard to jump off and use different muscles to propel your body forward. The longer and harder the bike ride, the harder the transition!

(A quick etymological note: I believe the term "brick" arose from the shorthand version of how the workout might appear in your training log. That is, a "BR" stands for "Bike + Run", and the prevalence of "BR" on training logs eventually led to "brick". This sort of linguistic portmanteau is not uncommon -- an abbreviated shorthand being un-abbreviated into something it didn't stand for in the first place -- though this particular etiology is somewhat disputed. Others have argued that "brick" refers to how heavy and lethargic your legs feel after this kind of workout.)

Anyway, Robin talked me into going for a bike ride before our typical Saturday morning long run. (Why do all my stories about extreme suffering involve Robin? What a jerk.) So we met at 6AM at Madison Park and rode our bikes briskly in the pre-dawn over the I-90 bridge to Mercer Island, and rode a good chunk of West Mercer Way, then back to Madison (maybe 30 miles in total)-- lots and lots of rolling hills . It was fun, exhilarating, and brilliant! I always love my time in the saddle. We got back just in time to join our running buddies, which meant I got to practice the transition in real-time: stripped my wet cycling gear off, and threw on a pair of dry shorts, shirt, and running shoes, then immediately started running. I wanted to run 13 miles... but didn't quite make it that far.

So what did I learn from this experience?

The Good:

The bike ride served as an excellent "warmup" for my run. Usually I spend the first 3 or 4 miles getting into a running rhythm before I feel good at all. This time, however, I hit the ground running because my legs were full of blood and endorphins. In fact, I felt awesome. For about 3 miles.

The Bad:

I felt too good. I ran my first 3 miles at a much faster pace than I could reasonably sustain for a 13 mile training run. I naturally fell into about an 8 minutes-per-mile pace, which intellectually I knew I would not be able to hold onto for very long. But I felt so good, I didn't want to slow down! Hmmm, this seems to be a pattern in my running. (See blog post about my first marathon). After about the 3 mile mark, I slowed down to a more reasonable pace, then by about mile 5 I slowed WAY down to a crawl and finished my run at around a 10 minute pace. Ouch.

The Ugly:

Nutrition, nutrition, nutrition. I burned all my muscle glycogen on the rolling hills of Mercer Way and in the 3-mile bike sprint to my car before my run. Oops. Worse than that, I didn't eat enough to make up for the lost fuel. I did manage to cram down a Luna Bar (you know, the Complete Nutrition Bar for Women? Excellent source of folic acid, and other vitamins. Not sure why I like chick bars so much). But Luna Bars only have about 180 calories. So, after an hour and a half on the bike, then about 30 minutes on my feet, I basically ran out of gas! It was a horrible, horrible feeling. I don't think I technically "bonked" because I saw the writing on the wall and curtailed my run by stopping at the 7.5 mile mark. Just flat out stopped. I need to be smart about event nutrition, or I will never be able to work out for more than 2 hours at a time! Nutrition management is an unavoidable requirement of the endurance athlete. Perhaps the only sine qua non.