Butcher - 2009-07-27 5:38 AM
Does anyone have any suggestions or comments?
I think it's foolish to disagree with BryanCD about anything triathlon related, and hopefully I'm not when I say...
I think it depends on why you're doing that long workout. If it's for training purposes
(Ie. a significantly longer session than your body is accustomed to doing
), then I wouldn't you do either unless you're very careful and you're WAY out from the race with plenty of time to recover from both fatique and possibly a minor injury.
On the other hand
(and I don't think this is the case or you wouldn't be asking the question
), if you've ramped up your fitness level to where these workouts are not a stretch for you
(like almost zero chance of injury and 100% chance of not requiring more than one rest day afterwards to be fully recovered
), then do whatever you feel like doing. In my personal opinion, I'd think the 3h/2h would be better but the last thing I want to do is participate in another BT debate on the value of bricks.
FWIW, I plan on doing the Bike/Run courses of my next HIM this week as a brick at a comfortable effort
(hopefully around 4.5 hours of effort
). But I think/hope that my fitness level is now to a point where this session won't be all that difficult for me as I've done many 4-7 hour bike rides in the mountains at altitude and quite a few 13.1 mile runs
(at harder than "easy effort"
), including two in a week with little to no recovery required.
The main reason that I want to do this brick session is for pacing. Because I live a mile above the race course in altitude, I get almost zero RPE feedback from my level of being out-of-breath during a race.
(All I really know is that if I'm out-of-breath, I'm definitely pushing way too hard for a HIM
). So I want to do the distance at a comfortable effort which will end up being some pace. And then during the race I can use that pace as my basis that I can improve upon if I'm feeling good. I'm also going to test my nutrtition plan since I've never done well with that during a HIM race.