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Ironman Bricks
There are two key bricks for Ironman. Long Bike to short run. Typically, this brick is 120 to 180km bike ride followed by 20-30min run. This is designed to get your legs familiar with the feeling of running with cycling fatigue.
This session should include lots of hills, pushing big gears and from 8 weeks out increasing sections at projected race pace (10-120km). To get the most out of this session you should also be eating, drinking and using your race position more and more as you approach the race.
The other key session for Ironman is a slightly shorter bike ride (70-120km) followed by a 45-90min run. Obviously, you need to think very carefully about how you place this session in your week relative to the long bike workouts and also, how you will also fit a long run in. Not easy! For many athletes who don't have the time to fit in these three workouts I will recommend that they look to alternate long runs with this second brick session. I think that as long as you have run close to 30km on two occasions that these bricks are of more value then say 3 hour runs.
Most people will do a 1/2 Ironman as part of their training for Ironman, this is a double edged sword, go too hard in a 1/2 Ironman and you will end up cooked before you get to the Ironman, this often happens when athletes are fatigued going into the 1/2 Ironman (not tapering because they are worried about loosing fitness for Ironman) and then go too hard during the bike and grovel in the run. The best advice I can give you is to be conservative and treat the session as training. If you are faster then your projected Ironman pace then you are getting what you need out of it. So if you are aiming for a 10 hour Ironman and you go 4:45 for the 1/2 but are not trashed then that is fine.