“18.66 miles”, 1:01:11 elapsed time

I rode with Lynda and Bill on their CompuTrainers. They have a sweet set up in their garage. 8 stations of CompuTrainers. There’s fans, goos, towels, and an awesome view of the city. Johnna, Jorge, Gregg, Allen, and Amy also rode. Bill picked the HalfMax Triathlon course. 18.66 mile course. There was hills at the front end of the course.

CompuTrainer is a great weekday workout, since the darkness has fallen and ended the bricks for the year.

If you haven’t ridden a CompuTrainer, this is how it works:

You mount your own bike on the trainer. Replace the rear skewer with a sturdy all metal type, not the lightweight ones you actually ride with. You attach a magnet on your crank and pick up on your chainstay. In the computer you enter your vitals: Weight, Functional Threshold, MaxWatts, virtual bike and colors. Tighten up the flywheel onto your rear tire. Warm up the trainer for a few minutes then calibrate the tension with the computer. During the ride, the computer adjusts the resistance on your trainer to correspond to grade based on your weight and wattage. The video display is split into 8 mini-screens; each rider can see themselves in the center of the view. They can watch other riders enter and exit their field of view, with a numbered color bubble floating above for identification. Ride data is displayed in their mini-screens. Along the bottom of the main screen, there is ride profile. It shows all the riders, where they are, what place they are in, and the distance between them. Drafting is calculated by the computer. When you ride behind another rider from 6 to 40 ft, the resistance goes down by about 25%, you’ll feel it in the reduced watts required to keep pace. You can flip through other data screens with attack angles, calories burnt.

The fun part is that everyone can see the positioning and watts that everyone is doing. You can see an attack happening and what as you get dropped on a hilll. It’s also fun, because you can chit chat with A group riders, where I’d usually be dropped in real life and never get to chat much. The only data to take home is the heart rate and elapsed time. After I get a power meter, I can upload that data to record the effort.