Brick questions

You will probably get many responses and differing opinions on this. Here are mine.

1) Do you ever brick all three activities together? I do, especially when I want to practice transitions. I will typically do something much smaller than even a sprint but I have one workout where I do 200 meters on my swim bench into a 15 minute spin on the bike and then into a 5 minute run. I will go through this evolution about 3 times and get a nice hour of transition practice.

2) Is there any sense in a swim to run brick (or run to bike brick, or bike to swim brick), since you never do these activities in this order? I do this as well although it will start as a bike/run brick but I will go back into a bike effort following the run. For example this past Saturday I did 3.5 hours of 45 minute bike/25 min run and then repeated 3 times.

3) Do bricks include tempo, intervals, or higher zone training? Or do you generally do bricks at a steady state and focus on speed during solo workouts? I do some bike/run bricks with the bike portions with some intervals (typically very short bursts at just over FTP) and then transitioning into runs at Half Iron pacing. I have seen many variations on this one as well.

For me I think bike/run bricks especially provide a nice compliment to increasing running mileage with adding a short off the bike run once or twice a week.