A ride less ordinary
Adventure Biking & the art of Going Slow & Getting lost
A Speedy Advance
I couldn’t be bothered to wait for the rear cassette to arrive and decided to use the trainer with my existing back-wheel.
I successfully attached the bike to the trainer, and after about 10 minutes managed to pair my phone with the device. I strapped my phone on top of my Garmin with a couple of elastic bands so that I could see the display easily whilst I was riding. Before ‘setting off’ I planned a 28 minute ‘test’ work out, consisting of an 8 minute warm-up, 4 minute medium exertion, 4 minute hard exertion, 8 minutes medium exertion and 4 minutes warm down. I wrote it down and kept the piece of paper visible to avoid memory issues.
As I started to peddle, the screen kicked into action with a second by second read out of RPM, Watts, Speed and distance ridden, and more importantly a real-time graph of these variables. As I switched from my easy warm up gear to a harder gear, for the medium exertion section, I see the watts jump reassuringly upwards and I settle into the next section of the exercise. I want to keep the watts between 140 and 160 as that is what I remember from my bike gym sessions as being around the medium mark (or, for people in the know, my ‘sweetspot’ ……..hold on there girls!!), with around 200 watts equating to hard exertion. As I’m nearing the end of my session, I see the next-door neighbour’s cat through the dining-room window. He’s pooing next to my purple sprouting and I have to resist the urge to stop, but by the end of the session, my thoughts are firmly on the task in hand and I’m a happy bunny. Fancy having a training laboratory in my own sitting room. Who’d have thought?
I spent the evening continuing to work out whether there was a way I could load the cycling app onto my tablet/mini laptop (an Asus Transformer Book; a Windows based mini lap-top, with a screen that detaches from the keyboard), but couldn’t find a way.
Summary of trials, tribulations & delights:
- I managed to generate my first training profile.
- I gave up on the idea of being able to download the Tacx Cyling App on my Asus Transformer Notebook.
A ride less ordinary 