Fifty miles, then ten

A brick is a bike ride followed straight away by a run, and the name is what your legs feel like for the first mile of the run. In the first week of May 2023, a month out from my first 70.3, I did the biggest one of the block: 50 miles on the bike, then 10 on foot.

The numbers weren't random. A 70.3 is 56 miles of bike and 13.1 of run, and a 50-and-10 gets you close enough to feel the shape of the day without it being the day. If the run off the bike was going to fall apart at mile three, that was something I needed to know in May and not in June in the lava. I also did it at the hour the race would happen, bike at dawn and run into the morning heat, because Honu's run starts around midday with no shade on it and the heat was the part I most needed to practice.

What we learned

The first mile of the run is a lie, it always feels wrong. Legs that have been pedaling for three hours don't want to run, and it takes a couple of miles before you can tell anything from them. Miles two and three usually decide whether it's a bad day or just a brick, and that week it was just a brick.

The other thing it taught us was eating. Fifty miles is long enough to run out of whatever you had for breakfast, and if you don't eat on the bike the run pays for it. Everything that came off that ride still in the pockets was food that hadn't worked, and the food that was gone was the food that went to the race.

It was on one of these 50-and-10 days that my friend Michael and I learned about salt. We were running down Kalanianaole Highway and both of us hit the wall at about eight miles, two miles from his house, when we came across a public park with a restroom and a woman sitting there who looked like she'd been out running. She said, "You guys look like you could use some salt," and broke out salt tablets, and within five minutes of taking one all the energy came back and I felt like Superman. We ran the last two miles feeling great. Salt tablets and sodium-heavy electrolyte drinks have been in the pockets ever since, because what you lose sweating for two hours out here is immense and you have to put it back.

New shoes, not race shoes

The same week had new shoes in it. They didn't get to race, they got to train, because the shoe that gets the bib is the one that's already done a long run, and these hadn't done anything yet but sit in the box.

This brick was the big one. The two weeks after it had the Honolulu Triathlon and the Hibiscus Half in them, then Honu, which is three race weekends in a row, and the next note is about getting two bodies through that.