A ride less ordinary
Adventure Biking & the art of Going Slow & Getting lost
The end of a (virtual) dream.
Having established that I couldn’t download the Tacx Cylcling App on my laptop/tablet, I thought I should aim big and look in to how to get Zwift or any other of the bigger Virtual Cycling experiences on my Smart telly (I mean who needs it on a tablet when you can get in on a big screen?). I quickly realised that you needed to load the software into a computer with the required 
amount of space and power, before linking it with a Smart telly.
The more I read and googled, the more that dream started slipping away. My desk top computer, which passed the specs test, is situated in my tiny office upstairs and whilst it has a big screen the logistics/space issues closes down that option, and moving my desk-top PC to my living room is not an option either. The only solution for my house would be to buy a powerful laptop and link it to the telly with an ‘ant+ antenna’ (something from Planet Earth II?).
I should say that throughout the process I was learning a lot about my computing devices, which is never a bad thing.
Later that morning I decided to repeat my first training exercise, but this time I replaced 2 minutes of medium for 2 minutes of hard at the end of the session, just before the warm down.
Whilst I was happy with the phone training app, I wanted to get my hands on the data, so I needed to work out how to get it off the phone and into a format that could be read into an excel spreadsheet. I ticked the box option for sending the training results to an email, and waited and waited. Okay so I couldn’t get that to work, but Tacx also have a Tacx:cloud, so I set up an account on the cloud, and waited and waited. Okay so I couldn’t get that to work either.
Summary of trials, tribulations & delights:
- I appeared to be getting consistent readings from my turbo trainer and successfully completed a second training session.
- I couldn’t transfer the data from my phone to another device.
- I couldn’t connect to any virtual cycling packages for logistical reasons.
- I was learning lots about the specs of my phone, tablet and Desk-top PC.
Footnote: The graph was produced after I had worked out how to get the data off my phone, obviously!
A ride less ordinary 