Home > Feature

Workout Wednesday: The long brick with Antoine Jolicoeur Desroches

A monster brick workout that will serve as the perfect prep for your half or full distance race.

Whether you are training for a sprint distance triathlon, an Olympic triathlon or an Ironman, brick workouts are a great way to get ready for your race. These workouts consist or alternating biking and running or even swimming, biking and running if you have access to a lake or a pool.

As I’ve moved up to half distance races and soon an Ironman, I’ve been doing long bricks workouts with the main objective to practice biking and running with tried legs. These long bricks workouts are really useful before the start of the season to get the body used to running off the bike with the intensity of a triathlon. I still like to do these workouts in the middle season, usually one or two weeks preceding a race.

This week’s long brick workout is as follows:

  • 4 x (15 km bike race pace & 5 km run race pace), so everything is at the same pace.

I’ve also previously done a set in which the intensity was increasing but the length was decreasing. If that option appeals more to you, here it is:

  •  30 km — 8 km , 20 km – 5 km, 10 km — 3 km.

This brick workout can be done inside on your trainer and your treadmill but I prefer to do it outside given how long it takes.

These long brick workouts are beneficial because they allow you to not only run with heavy legs but also bike with heavy legs. I personally feel that the hardest part of brick workouts is to go back on your bike and push race pace power after running few kilometers at race pace. The recovery between each set is really short: only 4 min, so it doesn’t allow you to recover between each set. 

So, no matter what distance you are training for, you can do this workout by varying the length, the intensity as well as the number of sets.