Duration of Brick Run only 10min a week on TR Tri Plan (Sprint)

I’m trying to find an optimal Duathlon plan for myself that works with AT and Plan Builder togehter.
Normally I train duathlon, so I choose a TR Sprint Triathlon plan for a full year with no competitions.
In principle, the plan seems to be okay, but a brick run of only 10 minutes per week for 12 month doesn’t seem to be enough to me.

Is this a mistake by Plan Builder with triathlon plans?

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The brick runs in the plans aren’t about building on your run fitness they are about getting out on a short run after a bike to have your muscles get used to the idea of transitioning between the sports. They are also generally really low intensity so they are nothing at all like what you will do on race day.

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Brick runs are just to get you use to the sensations of running off the bike - 10mins is enough. You should have specific fresh run sessions to improve your running. That said when I did triathlon a few years back I did find that a good session which combines both was - 10min warm up then 4x10mins@95% threshold on the turbo followed by 1k (or 4-5 mins if no available measurement) at 10k pace after each 10min block - so 4 mini bricks…you can spin for a couple of mins between each - takes about 75mins and is good for 1/ Speed 2/ Running off the bike 3/ Transition practice…leave your shoes by your turbo! :grinning:

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I was just used to my previous plan (TrainingPeaks) that the duration of the brick runs would be longer every month or so.

So first month 10min, then second month 15min and third month 20min and so on

Just wanted to make sure it wasn’t an AT related bug in the Plan Builder

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One of our club coaches has a horror session which is basically that but 5 minutes each time and harder! 5 mins of each for warm up and then 3 repeats through and a 5 minute cool down spin at the end. You REALLY feel it at the end.

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Bricks are always a trouble. There are people who swear by them as a way to improve on everything and others who say that attempting to do a proper run workout following a hard bike is a bad idea as you end up reinforcing any bad habits you have in your running because technique will suffer when fatigued.

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One thing I will say is that provided you do your bike training then the better you are running the better you run off the bike. I still do bricks even though I mostly just TT as it gives me some variety…only 15-20mins at the end of a TT or TR session. When I was doing a few summer tris about 5 years ago I had just run 2:47 at VLM - I was running 36mins 10k off the bike (and had one of the top 5 run splits of the day) purely because of the run strength from running a fast marathon :grinning:

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Given that this is a sprint tri plan 10min will be a reasonable % of your expected race day run time, likely more than 50% which should be more than enough to manage the sensations of running off the bike and getting into your run rhythm.

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