CompuTrainer

So where are we?

Well, it's still raining, still windy. That means lots of time on the CompuTrainer.

The CompuTrainer arrived a few weeks ago, and let me tell you that thing is great. Far, far superior a plain ol' trainer.

It has a bunch of sensors that you put on your bike, then all of that feeds into the software on the computer. The software has various courses that you can ride, or you can make your own. A bunch of Ironman and shorter triathlon courses are in there, which is interesting. Most are really hilly. Far hillier than we get around here on the real road. You ride along, seeing yourself on the screen and a competitor beside you. As your terrain changes and you go up and down hills the pressure on the rear wheel changes and really feels like a hill.

But the best part is the SpinScan analysis which shows your pedal efficiency. It shows you in real time where the power in your pedal stroke comes from. Ideally, the graph is flat as power is consistent throughout 360⁰. Basta's pedal stroke shows most power at the top. Now that he can really see that, he is supposed to be working on changing his stroke to get more consistent power throughout.

All of this requires a computer, preferably one dedicated to this, situated in front of the bike so that the course and stats can be easily viewed. I have an old computer that is just sitting there unused in my office. It didn't quite meet the specs needed for the software, though. It require 32M video RAM, which is pretty small by today's standards, but this old computer has 16M. It met all the other specs fine.

I decided to give it a try, anyway. It might work just fine, just the graphic rendering would be a bit slow. And it did. The program works beautifully. Scene transitions are slow, but they get there. When you're sitting on a bike spinning hard and going nowhere it's not like you're in a big rush to see a screen change, anyway.

So we set up our home bike gym. We got some rubber mats and converted a 4x8 section of the bedroom into a gym. There was a weight bench and some weights there, anyway, so this wasn’t a huge change. It just protects the carpet from potential bike crud.

The monitor went on a table in front of the bike. It was a good quality monitor in its day. Now it is considered huge and bulky, but the resolution and quality is still good. It's perfect for this.

All of the sensors and wires attach to the bike with velcro. It's kind of a task to get them all attached, but it gets easier and quicker with practice.

And best of all, Basta likes it. He says it's way, way easier to do this than to ride the simple fluid trainer in the garage for an hour. Easier in the mental sense. You don't just sit there thinking, 'god, when will this be over.' There are plenty of stats to admire -- heart rate, power output, pedal efficiency. You can race against the virtual guy next to you. When you repeat a given course you can race yourself's previous performance. That feature is really cool.

I have yet to put my bike on it and try it out, but I'm going to this weekend. It's supposed to be rainy and windy for the next several days, so no real riding for me, either.

Whenever we buy an item like this, I like to calculate the cost based on number of workouts. This thing cost $1670, so that's what the first ride cost us. The next time he used it, two days later, the cost per ride went down to $835. Three days later, another ride, $556/ride. And so on. As of today we've put 10 rides on it, so the cost per ride is now $167. When it gets down to $10 per ride I'll consider it paid for, since that's what we pay for a spin class a the gym. That'll be 167 rides. I seriously doubt if I'll be tracking it that long. But right now it's fun to see the number drop rapidly.