If your indoor training journey began this side of the indoor cycling cyber revolution, consider yourself extremely lucky. Nothing less than ‘revolution’ can do justice to the change from the old ways to the new. From counting bricks on the garage wall to connecting in real-time with thousand-strong cyber-pelotons made up of many nationalities, in onscreen worlds offering every watts, leaderboards, segment PRs and a dinosaur around every other corner. Forget boredom – this is pretty much sensory overload.
One thing though – if your adventures in indoor training began post-2015, you did miss out on the character building experience that means anyone who’s swung a leg over a noisy, standalone old-school trainer gets to feel nothing but gratitude every time they fire up Zwift, MyWhoosh, or Rouvy.
My indoor training experience actually began outdoors, on a set of Tacx rollers. At that point they were pretty much the most widely available indoor training device, owned by a lot of club cyclists. Aged 18, and a relative newbie to road cycling as a hobby, this was such a novel idea, being able to complete a ride while not actually going anywhere. I’d rigged them up so I could steady myself on the window ledge as I mounted up, which seemed to work pretty well. The training effect was limited, the boredom mitigated by the fact that if I’d drifted off for more than a few seconds, a faceplant onto the concrete was likely to be the result. The experience was also enlivened considerably by the fact that whenever I went to steady myself on the brick ledge I got an electric shock from the static build-up.
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Needless to say, when my mate Neil became the proud owner of a brand spanking new indoor trainer, I was probably more excited than he was to try it out.
Rewind to the very early Nineties, and there we both were in his garage, admiring it as if we’d stumbled across a trove of Babylonian treasure. Of the two of us, Neil always led the way when it came to new cycling tech (and often on the bike too). He had a cycle-computer first. And an alloy-framed bike, and now he had an indoor trainer. We took it in turns to spend a few exhilarating minutes each, riding as hard as we could, before swapping back over to let the other one rejoin the fun.
My indoor riding journey had begun.
It didn’t last long. My rollers got bruléed in a car fire and I never felt compelled to replace them. Meanwhile, and to the surprise of no one reading this, the novelty of Neil’s turbo trainer wore off for both of us, just as quickly as it had appeared. There ensued a hiatus of seven years or so during which college, cheap student union booze and bands confined training – and any thoughts of doing so indoors – to ‘bubbling under’ status.
And then I started working at Cycling Weekly.
Training, and racing was soon back on the agenda, and paying for coaching from a pre-Doctor Hutch era Michael Hutchinson quickly followed that. A predilection for outlandish interval sessions in his coaching plans, as well as his own apparent imperviousness to pain and boredom during sessions of up to several hours on the trainer was impelling and inspiring in turns. And so it was, almost inevitably, that I found myself in Cycling Weekly’s old workshop, during lunch hours, or after work, on a noisy old trainer, cracking out 2 x 15min of 10/20sec on-off intervals – or whatever other deliciousness the doc had in store that week.
Nothing good comes easy, so they say – and believe me, the fitness gains that came from these sessions was won hard in the old-school. This was 2002. Music streaming and podcasts were not a thing, let alone Zwift and the like. You stared at the wall, three feet in front of you, and as for audio accompaniment well, that would be the laboured whoosh-and-whine of a trainer that had all the natural fluidity of a first-timer in the Cooper’s Hill Cheese Roll.
Even back then, if you were lucky you did at least have a few numbers to watch to keep your brain from imploding while all this was going on. The trainer I used displayed time, and watts – although the latter was likely no more accurate than pulling a number out of the air and multiplying it by your gran’s most recent shopping bill. A crude cable pull controlled resistance.
And that was about the way things remained for the next decade or so, albeit with minor improvements in trainer ride feel, and the introduction of MP3 players and the ipod, both of which could prove useful in an indoor training scenario, and helped keep sweat away from your Sony Discman.
The last trainer I had before going Zwift featured fluid resistance and a gel roller for ‘realistic road feel and quiet operation’. In reality my family had to turn the TV up even if I was using it out in the garage. While annoying for them, they could at least seek solace in the idea that I was fighting off deep physical discomfort and mental anguish with strategies that included counting all the slats in the garage door, or inspecting every brick in turn.
Which brings us, inevitably, to the advent of Zwift. It had been around for a few years before I came to it. Although working in cycling media I well remember the excitement that it had caused in the office when it was launched. The excitement, and the novelty, was reminiscent of the scene in Neil’s garage all those years ago, as we crowded round to see videos of ‘in-game’ action.
(Image credit: Future)
Thanks to the wonders of Strava, I can reveal that my first ride in the virtual world took place on Sunday 9 September 2018 and was called ‘That so-called Zwift’. It took me up Fox Hill in London and back. I obviously thought it was OK, because after three weeks of all-indoor riding I ended up performing an FTP test – and even that didn’t seem to put me off.
Those early days hardly turned me into the kind of Zwift-banger who puts in 20 hours a week on the platform, but it’s always been there. And it’s served different purposes – protection from the weather of course, but also a super-accessible way to race and, after a particularly unpleasant dalliance with sciatica, a useful rehabilitation tool. New courses and worlds keep things interesting, as does the community feel – one of the platform’s key strengths, I would say.
I’ve tried other platforms too. I loved the IRL scenery and the video-realistic elements of Rouvy, while RGT and its Magic Roads were a fun concept but didn’t really deliver in reality, at least for me.
Whichever platform, though, the best smart trainers and virtual platforms are a total paradigm shift from the old school. These days those 10/20second interval sessions would still be just as physically hard – although thankfully I have limited call for them these days – but all the numbers, the colours, the other riders and, yes, the dinosaurs of online riding are distracting enough to make things significantly less soul-crushing.
As an old-school old git who would happily waffle on about the good old days of steel frames and polished groupsets ad infinitum given the chance, I have nothing but respect for you if you’re still doing it the old-fashioned way, labouring away on a dumb trainer, counting the bricks on the wall. There’s an easier, funner way though, and I’d highly recommend a little potter into the virtual cycling world to see what you’re missing.
One word of warning though – once you’ve seen it, you’re never going back.
