I finally got a computrainer

A lot of my talk has been focused on the bike trainer lately. That finally may change soon as currently the forecast calls for temperatures in the 50's this weekend.... but we shall see. But for at least a few more days, the inside bike workouts will continue. But what can possibly make that easier to bear? A computrainer, of course.

I have wanted to get one of these since I learned they existed. In the meantime, I've been using an old trainer my father bought probably sometime around 1998. He's a cyclist, and he picked one up to ride in the winter. I think he might have used it three times. He's just more of an outside-on-warm-days-when-it's-not-raining kind of rider. I can't say I blame him. Sometimes I think about how nice it would be to look out the window on a day I'm supposed to ride, see that it's raining and just put it off until tomorrow. But of course, that's not going to get me anywhere. But anyway, I think I started using it in 2004 once I decided to do something other than spin classes at the gym to keep myself in cycling shape while it was too cold to ride. Bottom line: the thing is old. It isn't a bad trainer. Actually, it has served me quite well. It's got a shifter thing to adjust the resistance to I think a grand total of three levels, but it doesn't really matter because that cable has long since rusted through and doesn't work anymore anyway. At least it rusted through while it was in the hardest setting. So I just shift the gears.

It's only really noisy for about the first 15 minutes until it warms up and stops making this loud buzzing sound, the origin of which I don't care enough about to try and figure out since it always goes away eventually. The problem has been that this year I've been given some specific workouts to do that involve some very low cadence work at a best effort intensity. With my old trainer, I can do one or the other, but not both. I can obviously pedal as hard as I can for each interval and get my heart rate up, but the resistance isn't hard enough to get my cadence anywhere near low enough for this kind of strength-building. On the other side, surely I could just pedal slower, but that isn't exactly taxing. So I had been doing the best I could, but really, it seemed like it was time to get the computrainer and actually be able to measure my progress. So I was on the phone last week with Fast Splits, the trusty "local" tri shop (down in Massachusetts) and last night at about 6pm UPS showed up at the door with my new computrainer.

Then of course comes that combination of excitement and dread. Ok, I finally got my computrainer and can really get started. But man, now I've got to try and set the thing up and figure out how the heck it works. I hate learning curves. Amazingly, it didn't really take an incredibly long time to get everything hooked up. I think the software is going to take a bit longer. I got too tired last night to figure that part out though, so I called it quits.

This morning I had a 90-minute easy ride to do. For my first computrainer ride I suppose I could've done something more interesting, like ridden some course or used one of the real course videos, but I opted not to even hook up the computer and just use the ergometer mode and hold a steady wattage the whole time. I figure I've got plenty of time for playing. I think I calibrated it correctly, and off I went. First computrainer ride was a success, although I barely used any of the fun features. Tomorrow I really get to test it with some higher wattage stuff and lower cadence stuff. And although I'm sure it will be fun to play with, I really, really hope that the forecast stays true for Saturday and I get to do my first outdoor long ride since early December. Nothing like riding by the ski area on your bike.