Double Brick Saturday

I convinced my friend P (and her hubby, U, who often comes along for the ride) to join me for another big workout this morning. Truthfully, though, it didn’t take much convincing. Lucky for me, she’ll say ‘yes’ before finding out what’s involved in my training schemes. 🙂

Today’s agenda included 2 x (45 minute ride, 30 minunte run).

I had a party to get to at noon, so we had to forgo the Saturday sleep-in and get started early. I woke up to discover a generous dumping of fresh snow (and it continued to snow all morning).

I had dropped my bike and trainer off ahead of time so there would be less gear to schlep early Saturday morning. I was so glad to have done that! There were still a lot of bags involved, as usual.

I had my usual pre-endurance workout breakfast of  tea, OJ and a PB&J bagel then headed over to P’s house. I took a few minutes to lay out my gear for transition and we got started.

I’m in charge of the overall workout plan, so P gets to decide on our bike workouts. Our first 45 minute ride entailed a 15 minute warm up, 20 minutes of 1-min hill/1-min sprint intervals (no rest in between) and a 10 minute cool down. These intervals make the time fly by and before we knew it, we were hopping off the bikes and layering up for our first brick run of the day.

There was a ton of snow on the ground and none of the roads or sidewalks had been cleared, so we trudged along and ran in tire tracks when possible. There wasn’t much traffic out at all and it was actually a very peaceful and enjoyable run. 30 minutes later, we were back at homebase and ready for round 2.

After a quick wardrobe change we hopped back on the bikes to discover extremely sluggish legs. I couldn’t believe how tired they were! I felt better after warming up, but this ride was a lot harder. The interval set this time consisted of 15 minute warm up and 20 minutes of 3-min hill/1-min sprint intervals, followed by 10 minute cool down. As we wobbled up the stairs after, I had serious doubts about the second brick run we had on deck!

Out we shuffled… to find even more snow! This time P’s hubby had to stay behind to catch up on shovelling. We were definitely tired, but not terribly. Despite all the snow and messy roads, it was such a beautiful morning and very hard not to be happy out there. We followed the same route (our foot steps were long gone!) and found ourselves at the “finish line” in no time – well, about 30 seconds slower than the first run.

We were exhausted but happy after a big morning of workouts.

After cleaning up and heading to another friend’s one-year-old’s Birthday party, I was rewarded for my efforts with unlimited make-your-own fajitas and a cupcake. Hit the spot!

And now I’m trying to wrap my mind around a 20 mile run tomorrow… after that, I will definitely have earned Monday’s holiday sleep-in.