Brick Workouts Explained: The Most Skipped Session in Triathlon Training

If I had to guess which session gets skipped most often in a self-coached triathlete's training log, I'd bet on the brick workout every time. It's not because triathletes don't know what a brick is. It's because bricks are uncomfortable, they take extra planning, and skipping one feels harmless in the moment. It isn't.

A brick workout, riding immediately followed by running, is the only time in training you actually rehearse the single hardest transition in the sport. Nothing else in your week replicates the feeling of stepping off the bike after 56 or 112 miles and asking your legs to run.

Your legs don't run the same off the bike, and only practice fixes that. Cycling and running use your muscles differently. After a long ride, blood flow and neuromuscular patterning are shifted toward cycling, and your first mile off the bike is going to feel heavy and awkward no matter how fit you are. Athletes who never practice this get blindsided by it on race day. Athletes who brick regularly know exactly what those first ten minutes feel like and know how to settle into their real pace instead of panicking.

Bricks teach pacing discipline you can't learn any other way. I see this constantly with first-time 70.3 and full-distance athletes: they bike too hard because the bike feels good, then have nothing left for the run. A brick session, especially one where you practice race-effort bike pace followed immediately by goal race-day run pace, teaches your body and your head what sustainable actually feels like before it costs you on race day.

You don't need a brick every week, but you do need them consistently. For my athletes building toward a 70.3 or full, I typically program a brick every 7 to 10 days once we're in the build phase, with the run portion getting longer and closer to race pace as the race approaches. Early season, even a short 10 to 15 minute transition run off an easy ride is enough to start training the pattern.

Treat the transition itself as part of the workout. Practice racking your bike, getting your shoes on, grabbing what you need, and getting moving quickly. Transition time adds up over a full season of racing, and the only way to get efficient at it is to rehearse it under some fatigue, not fresh.

The athletes I've coached to Kona and 70.3 World Championship qualification didn't get there by avoiding discomfort in training. They got there by rehearsing the exact discomfort they'd feel on race day, enough times that it stopped being a surprise. If your brick sessions have been the first thing to get skipped when the week gets busy, that's worth changing before your next big race, not after a rough one.

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