First Brick of 2011

Today was my first brick of the year! I did 24 minutes in the pool followed by 48 minutes on a bike at the gym, following Day 2 of Week 1 of my 20-week training plan.

First off: what's a brick? It's a workout where you do one workout followed immediately by another, typically a swim followed by a bike or a bike followed by a run. I did my first brick training for my first tri back in '07 (it wasn't pretty): while in the gym one day I did 20 minutes on a bike and then walked over and tried to run on a treadmill. My calves locked up tight and had to stop walking after 5 minutes and sit down. Much has changed since then. Back to today...

The swim: 24:10, ~800 yards Lap Pool at the Pro Club, Bellevue proclub.com

Yes, I'm slow. My 100m time is somewhere around 2:30. The pool was a 25 yard pool and felt a little on the chilly side. Flip turns continue to elude me but I'll work on that later when I'm not so pressed for time. This was my first swim since my crash back in August. I had a lane in the lap pool all to myself and kept up a constant pace of 28 strokes per 25 yards. On the first lap I had a mysterious foot cramp that was quite painful but went away before my first turn.

The bike: 48:00, 13.5 miles, avg. 17.8 MPH

The bike ride was 48 minutes of the hill profile on a Lemond Trainer. One of these days I'll use the USB feature on the bike and download my ride stats for further analysis. Training Peaks is on my list of things to investigate this year.

Conclusions: Wow, it's been a while. Overall I did pretty well considering I haven't been in a pool in nearly 5 months. No major revelations today but it is only the first week of training for the new year.

Speaking of which, the gym was pretty crowded with all the New Years resolution folks. Sometime around mid-February the gym will be back to the regulars that actually keep resolutions, although by late March I'm doing all my runs and rides outside and by June all my swims as well.