When it's best to ride indoors

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Monday, 17 January 2011 10:48

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Bike trainers excel in four areas

It's always winter somewhere. So while those south of the equator enjoy good cycling weather, northern hemisphere riders are spending a good amount of time cycling indoors. And when the shoe's on the other foot, it's riders in countries like South Africa and Australia that are in the market for an indoor bike trainer.

That's because bike trainers eliminate a lot of cycling problems.

Bike Trainers Solve Warm-Up Problems
My earliest exposure to a bike trainer was over twenty years ago. I was watching a small town relay-style triathlon and a local hotshot cyclist was huffing and puffing away on his trainer, waiting for the swimmer to complete his leg.

I'd spent many years as a runner who'd warmed up for a few thousand races by running out on the race course or the surrounding roads, and it seemed odd to me that he wasn't getting ready for his bike leg by doing a real ride. He looked like a showoff to me. But when I started competitive cycling many years later, I came to appreciate the controlled warm-up a bike trainer provides.

When I warmed up before a bike race out on the road, I was plagued with stop signs, other racers wanting to visit, uphills where I didn't want them to be, descents when I needed ascents and a host of other factors that made my warm-ups ineffective. A well-designed warm-up on my bike trainer solved all of those problems.

It's Never Freezing On A Bike Trainer
There are a few areas of the world that never get appreciable winter weather, but for the rest of us trainers allow us to maintain some semblance of conditioning when the snow's building up beside the road and the ice threatens to knock us off our bike. Even when it's technically possible to ride outside, the thought of spending an hour or two on a bike with a windchill below freezing can make getting out the door a daunting task. Doing a workout on a bike trainer may have it's own set of temperature related challenges, but getting chilled to the bone isn't one of them.

Bike Trainers Don't Need Headlights
My least favorite time of the year are the months when I go to work in the dark and get home after sunset. That's when getting in a daily ride is next to impossible unless your mountain bike is equipped with expensive lights, or you're willing to strap a blinking tail light on your road bike and take your chances with drivers who're having a hard time seeing where they're pointing their cars. There are dark times of the year when it's just safer to stay indoors and ride a workout on a bike trainer.

The Hills Are Always Where They Need To Be On A Trainer
On a bike trainer you can always insert hills where you need them to be in the course of your workout. You can ride steady state whenever your workout dictates it and you can even soft pedal precisely at the moment your coach has prescribed. In short, on a bike trainer you have complete control over any workout.

If you're doing any kind of structured training you'll find that the roads can be uncooperative. I live in a town that has only three stop lights, so interrupting workouts with red lights isn't much of a problem. But when I ride in the city with my teammates, it's a whole different story... where kilometres of interruptions are the norm. Interruptions aren't conducive to executing a well planned workout. Even where there aren't too many stoplights or stop signs, the unpredictable nature of the roads may get in the way of riding hard when you need to and easy at other times. But on a bike trainer, a hill is as close as cranking up the intensity and rest is as easy as soft pedalling until you've recovered.

A word of advice regarding doing high intensity workouts on trainers... In order to get enough resistance for these types of sessions, you'll do well to use a high quality fluid trainer like the Kurt Kinetic Road Machine or the Cycleops Fluid 2. Other types of trainers (wind trainers and most mag trainers) don't generate enough resistance to make interval training practical.

Trainers Solve A Host Of Cycling Problems
Whether it's seasonal darkness, or crazy cold that'll put a deep freeze to your bone marrow, bad conditions won't slow you down since the weather's always fine on a bike trainer. And when it comes to needing some control of your environment during a structured workout, or during a well timed warmup before a race, you can count on a bike trainer to never leave you fuming at a stop sign or a train crossing.

Ron Fritzke is a cycling product reviewer with a passion for all things cycling. A former 2:17 marathoner, he now directs his competitive efforts toward racing his bike... and looking for good cycling products. www.cycling-review.com