It’s raining outside and you had planned to venture out for
a long bike ride, one’s first instinct (rather mine) would be scrap the workout
and try tomorrow. My first answer to
combat this dilemma was to purchase a bike trainer. I did just that - foraging through Ebay, Craiglist, and multiple local
online classifieds to obtain the perfect indoor trainer in my price range. The CycleOps Super Magneto Pro became my new
way of combatting my missed workouts since living in Canada comes with such
haphazard weather patterns.
After about 4 weeks of using my indoor bike trainer on rainy days, it became a chore. I dreaded spending even 30 minutes starring into the abyss or watching a movie for the 3rd time while I pedaled aimlessly. After reading up on ways to battle this indoor hypnosis, I stumbled across TrainerRoad, a piece of software that has made indoor bike training my main routine!
TrainerRoad, designed and created by Nate Pearson and Reid
Weber, has much to offer to the cycling and triathlon community on a budget
(pretty much all of us!). Upon opening
their website, they demonstrate how easy it is to setup and use with a 3 step
process. Provided you have a laptop, an
ANT+ USB stick, and an ANT+ product such as a heart rate monitor, speed/cadence
sensor, or power meter, you are ready to rock and roll. Additionally, there are three ways to workout
with their assortment of over 300 pre-designed workouts which are categorized
on their website based on duration, intensity, interval duration, training
zones and type. The three ways
TrainerRoad’s workouts can be customized to your physical ability is through
heart rate, a power meter, or their patented Virtual Power. Since the workouts are designed based on
percentage of Functional Training Power (FTP), each workout is unique to the
user and will cause sufficient physiological stress to meet the goals of the
workout. Your FTP will be measured
whenever your conduct the 8 minute or 20 minute FTP test workout in conjunction
to your lactate threshold heart rate. This
is such an impressive feature alone – but wait – there’s more!
If you do not have the money to dish out for power meter, which
can cost upwards of $3000 for top of the line, you can invest in a $35 Garmin
speed/cadence sensor to compliment your ANT+ USB stick and use their patented
Virtual Power. They have designed power
curves specific to the trainer you use that calculates power based off of data
obtained from the speed/cadence sensor.
Although I do not own a power meter and cannot say how accurate it is, I
can however say that it will serve as a means of monitoring progression during
the winter months even if it can’t dish out your actual power. All this for such an affordable price...
So now I have a measurement of power to work off of during
the winter months and rainy days – AWESOME!
But what about the boredom associated with riding inside? Well, if you are not busy watching what the
workout has you doing (IE: intervals, hill repeats, low cadence, sprints, etc),
you can load up a video in the background and have the software overlay a small
portion at the bottom of the screen. If
you are watching a widescreen movie, you do not miss a piece of the action at
all!
After you finish your workout, all your data is nicely
organized on their website for future review. Additionally, you get awarded
badges as your progress in your riding potential. Not only can you track your progress,
whenever your workout pushes you past previous bests, you get rewarded with a
virtual badge! Below is a screenshot of
your Career page and how it monitors
your workouts.
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| The Career page of your TrainerRoad account |
Not impressed yet?
You can also review a workout right after and look at all the data
recorded or uploaded it to a 3rd party software such as TrainingPeaks. The post workout data is a
graphical representation of your workout including power and heart rates. Additionally, tabs at the bottom open up
different tables outlining your various training zones based on heart rate,
power, and your bests performances during the workout. Also, if you mouse over
an interval, it is highlighted in the graph as demonstrated in the screen shot
below.
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| Workout report for my most recent ride - Gemeni. |
This review is not even close to encapsulating the feature
rich TrainerRoad and where it plans on going.
There are workout plans ranging from novice to advance riders which will
leave the guesswork out of choosing what workout to do (which is a problem I
have run into many times). You can check
out other users and previous rides they have done on the website. They have worked hard with TheSufferfest.com
and have implemented video workouts, a feature I have yet to try but wish to in
the near future. Just pop in the video
and prepare to enter the Pain Cave. There
is an active Support and Feedback section on the website where people can
propose new ideas and others vote whether they would like it or not.
Future features include a Workout Creator which should be
released soon. This would allow users to
create their own workouts or edit previously existing workouts to their
liking. Furthermore, there have been
talks of multiplayer support in the Feedback section and that would be such an
amazing feature that would set this software in line with Tacx Virtual Reality Trainer but at a fraction of the price, a very small fraction.
The reason I have neglected to say the price of this
software is because it almost feels like highway robbery. For $10 a month, you get all the features I
briefly outlined and so much more. If
you do the math, it would take 5 years of using TrainerRoad to buy the cheapest
power meter on the market, but you wouldn’t have such amazing software to
combine with indoor riding. Did I mention it is $10 a month?
TrainerRoad is the best cycling software by far and will
continue to raise the bar for any software that wishes to take it on. It may have been an idea just a few years
ago, but it has grown into a stable and powerful software that will make any
cyclist improve in no time. Thank you
Nate and Reid for creating this strong training tool that has become a vital
asset to my training. No more missed
workouts!
For more information on TrainerRoad, please visit their
website by clicking here. Trust me, for $10 a month, you
cannot go wrong.
