“Misery loves company”

was once the rallying cry of an old training partner and mine.   When the winter weather had taken a turn for the worse, it didn’t take much more than speaking that phrase to inspire either of us to suit up and head out into the muck and put in the miles.  Thinking back on a few of those rides, perhaps we should have added that “stupidity also enjoys company”.  That was a time when indoor training was seen as a last resort, only to be practiced when you simply “couldn’t” ride outside……and you can almost ALWAYS ride outside.  Training in your basement was akin to solitary confinement, and as I mentioned previously, “misery loves company”.

I’ve carried this distaste for indoor training for the past 20 years or more.  I’d avoided the trappings of Spinning, and ignored the incremental technology improvements that had been made to rollers and trainers.  I thought that I’d risen above those things by avoiding them, but now I see that I placed myself  in a time capsule for 20 plus years.  Smart trainers are a game changer, it’s as if I have stepped out of a DeLorean Time Capsule and have stepped back into the future.

If you’re anything like me, you’re riding time has diminished and therefore your training time needs to be more structured, I present to you the Smart Trainer.  Your coach has given you very specific workouts with precisely timed intervals which you can rarely achieve because of traffic, a pesky hill, or a mechanical, I present to you the Smart Trainer.  Your 9 to 5 job cuts into whatever daylight riding time you might have had, I present to you the Smart Trainer.  And lastly, you just can’t force yourself to the basement to spend an hour down there riding by yourself, I present to you the Smart Trainer (because it’s almost like riding with your buddies).

A Smart Trainer is as instrumental to your performance and improvement as is a professional bike fit or training with a Power Meter.  Perhaps my old training partner and I were right about one thing, and that is that misery DOES love company, and with a Smart Trainer and Zwift, you’ll never ride alone again, unless of course because you want to.  You can ride with your old training buddy, even though he lives on the other side of the country, or the world for that matter.  You can see how you stack up against the pros, if you’d like.  But ultimately, you can improve your fitness, work on your weaknesses, and become a better cyclist more easily with a Smart Trainer.  If you won’t take my word for it, then take if from my old training partner and Aeolus Endurance Training/Velopro coach, Adnan Kadir. 

Adnan Kadir wrote:

"Smart trainers and the gamification of indoor cycling have made indoor training more bearable (and even fun!) for riders, and have been a boon for coaches.  With smart trainers, coaches can write workouts that the trainer will then run the rider through precisely - no waiting for stop lights, dilly dallying at the coffeeshop, or missing power targets.  It comes at the cost of "road feel," but now strides are being made in that department as well with products like Saris' MP1 Trainer Platform.  What's more is that indoor cycling, once the domain of spin studios and gyms, is now more widely accepted as a legitimate way to train for cycling".

Or from that of our professional Triathlete Kate Vermann:

Kate Vermann wrote:

"In the not so distant past, indoor training was synonymous with boredom, if not total misery. Yes, they always provided a safe, consistent, efficient, environment for the “serious training” – things like long intervals that can be challenging to do outside or an opportunity to get it done on even the worst days. But, at least for me, that type of training felt like it came at a cost of my ability to enjoy riding my bike and my sanity. 

Smart trainers, and, in turn, zwift have taken that aspect of indoor training away and replaced it with something that’s genuinely fun, while giving riders the opportunity to still be competitive on their own terms from the safety of their own homes. There’s something pretty cool about riding with your friends (digitally) or racing people around the world without having to go anywhere.

For me, personally, zwift and my wahoo kickr have also improved my ability to ride on mixed terrain or on long climbs because the software effectively simulates those types of environments. If anything, it makes those “serious training” intervals more realistic because the world outside doesn’t have “constant resistance” the way a standard trainer does, so the smart trainer makes it possible to simulate race conditions for your intervals in a way that wouldn’t be possible outdoors (at least, for a city dweller who has to ride a solid 40 minutes before getting somewhere it’s even possible to ride for more than a few minutes without stopping".