Watch: Steve’s first time on the rollers
The good thing about being young – apart from the obvious fact that you aren’t old – is that falling off your bicycle is but a minor inconvenience. You hit the deck, bounce straight back up and, with grazed knees and a solitary tear trickling down your cheek, happily remount your BMX or Grifter and resume your quest to catch the bad guys – all in one fluid and seamless motion.
Not so when you’re old.
When you fall off your bike in later life, you don’t bounce; you become one with the Earth’s surface, as though attempting to fossilise yourself in whichever patch of substrate has had the misfortune to break your fall.
Over the past two years, I’ve embedded myself in a variety of different surfaces – grass, mud, dirt, tarmac, gravel – with troubling regularity. I’m now on first-name terms with the triage team at my local A&E and, as pleasant as they invariably are, I have a strong desire to never see them again. I’m sure the feeling is mutual.
So why am I finding it increasingly difficult to stay rubber-side down? I put it down to a combination of ego and age. If the people on YouTube can rumble down technical descents with silky-smooth precision, surely I can, too. And as far as age goes, perhaps I’m actually unlearning how to ride a bicycle. My balance, it seems, isn’t what it used to be.
Tired of my perpetual moaning, my friend and colleague at Cycling Weekly, Dan Baines, suggested that, rather than spending the winter welded to my turbo trainer, a set of rollers might go some way towards improving my bike-handling ability.
Unlike modern turbo trainers, whose weight sees them stuck limpet-like to the floor, demanding little more from the rider than pedal strokes, rollers are a completely different proposition. You need to use body weight and momentum to keep the bike balanced, while smooth, fluid pedalling – souplesse, to use the French cycling term – and a consistent cadence are paramount to avoid a violent collision with the floor.
So, I decided to take his advice and have a go.
Getting started
Measure the wheelbase of the bike to get the rollers set-up correctly
(Image credit: Future)
Having procured a set of Quick Motion rollers from the good people at Elite, I was genuinely taken aback by the sheer simplicity of this piece of apparatus. It looked, to be frank, downright medieval. Try as I might, I couldn’t quite picture myself happily pedalling away on what was essentially a raised frame comprising little else than three bright red rotating cylinders .
“Any more surprises?” I asked Dan, gesturing towards the rollers. “You’re not going to bring out a dunking stool for the warm-down or anything?”
Dan, having started cycling sometime in the late 1800s, is something of an authority on rollers and had a few tips to help get me started.
Top tips for riding on rollers
- Always have a bail-out option. A wall to lean against, a step to put your foot on – anything that prevents an embarrassing meeting with the floor.
- Keep your cadence up. A faster cadence helps promote stability.
- Look ahead, not down. Don’t panic if your front wheel starts veering from side to side. Above all, resist the temptation to stare at it.
- Try to relax.
Try to relax, he says. At this stage, I was so convinced I was about to meet the triage team for our quarterly catch-up that relax wasn’t a word in my current repertoire.
Regardless, after measuring the bike’s wheelbase and adjusting the roller frame accordingly, I enlisted the help of a neighbouring wall and a step, unceremoniously swung a leg over the bike and prepared to pedal. Or at least, I would have done, had the tension not been so great that I instinctively grabbed the front brake and promptly fell against the wall in a state of confusion.
This did not feel natural.
“Relax,” Dan reiterated.
From one minute, to phoning home…
The first pedal strokes involved a fair few failures
(Image credit: Future)
The aim of this first session was to ride unassisted for a minute. “If you can achieve that,” Dan told me, “you’ve more or less mastered the basics. Then you’ve got a winter of fine-tuning your balance, pedalling fluidity and souplesse ahead of you.”
And so here I was, essentially learning to ride a bike all over again, with my de facto father, Dan, nervously tracking my progress.
It was a little like being a child again, attempting those first few metres on two wheels without on your own. The moment you glance over your shoulder to discover that Mum or Dad has let go and you’ve been riding under your own steam for the past few metres – before inevitably falling off due to the sheer excitement of it all.
That was how I felt when I finally found my rhythm. A genuine sense of accomplishment. This was something beyond anything I’d ever experienced on a turbo trainer: a far more involved, far more visceral way to ride a bike indoors.
A minute passed, then two, then three. Soon I was shifting into the big ring and even throwing in a sprint.. I was getting thirsty. Muscle memory kicked in and reaching down for my water bottle I once again found myself splayed against the wall before beginning a slow and squeaky descent toward the floor.
Soon, Steve was feeling confident
(Image credit: Future)
Erratic movements and rollers aren’t the happiest of bedfellows. But stolen bidon sips slowly morphed into hearty glugs and my confidence returned. I even managed to make a phone call to my better half, who admittedly thought I was in the throes of some sort of psychotic episode.
A rare success, then. An afternoon on the rollers had proved a lot more productive and far less painful than anticipated and I’ve now added an extra tool to my arsenal for training this winter.
Granted, I still need to learn how to ride in a pair of cycling shoes. I have a way to go before I feel confident riding intervals, but, that represents an opportunity. After one session, I’ve got the basic skills in my toolkit to progress.
Will it keep me from darkening the doors of A&E? That remains to be seen. But I’ve been reminded that there’s more to indoor training than chasing watts and watching numbers on a screen. It’s worth stepping back, stripping things down to the absolute basics and relearning a skill you thought you’d mastered decades ago. I’ll be back for another session next week. I’ll also be keeping that wall handy.
