Riding a Computrainer indoors during the winter is a great way of maintaining or even improving fitness. With my impeccable sense of timing, I purchased my Computrainer this fall a week after their $100 off deal expired (the summer, understandably, is their off season).
Setup
The Computrainer unboxing experience is quite unlike the unboxing experience of modern electronics. It arrives in a large brown box, and has manuals that look like those from 1980's era software; if they only came in a 3-ring binder and had floppies in a zip-lock bag, it would complete my trip down memory lane. The cables use DIN-5 connectors, 1/8" mono headphone jacks, and serial connectors. I'm not kidding. It's almost like they manufactured all of their inventory in the 1980's and are still selling that stock. To connect it to your computer you need to use a serial to USB adapter, which is thankfully included in the box. While it's easy to make fun of the primitive state of the electronics, the setup does work remarkably well and is quite reliable.
The trainer itself is sturdy and well-built, and is a cinch to calibrate. Calibration involves spinning up to 25mph and letting the rear wheel freewheel to a stop so that the electronics can measure the rolling resistance between the tire and the rear roller. You'll need to calibrate it each time you ride it, and calibration is best done when the tire is warmed up after riding for a few minutes first.
One major point of frustration:getting the cadence reading to work at all. No matter how I tried to reposition the cadence sensor to minimize the gap between the magnet and the sensor, it failed to register a reading. So I decided to throw some science at the problem: I ordered a tube of rare earth magnets from Amazon. These are incredibly powerful magnets; pulling two of them apart is virtually impossible (instead, you separate them by sliding them apart). I stuck one onto the spindle of my pedal and my cadence sensor began reading signals right away. One nice side effect of using these magnets is not having to have ugly straps to hold your magnet onto your crank arm, something I appreciate more now that I have Campy Super Record 11 carbon cranks on my "good" bike.
Finally you'll need to find a place to setup the trainer. Mine is setup in the storage room in our basement. I have enough room there for the bike, a 22" LCD panel, and a large diameter fan. I really appreciate convenience of having my old road bike permanently mounted to the trainer. Taking the bike on and off the trainer is about a 5 minute procedure, which would quickly become annoying at 5AM. There are many ridable days during the winter in Seattle, so this would be something that you'd have to do if you only had one bike.
Riding
I'm not a fan of the Computrainer software. I'm hoping that their upcoming release of their Racermate One software update in February 2011 will be an improvement. Fortunately, there's a fantastic software available from Ergvideo, a Canadian company. Here's a sample from one of their videos:
The video experience makes you feel like you're riding in the middle of a pack. The wattage that you must output depends on what's happening in the video. For example, you'll need to increase your wattage on an uphill or when the rider in front of you pulls off. You can decrease your wattage when you bridge up to the break or start descending a hill. It's remarkably realistic once you get the hang of it.
So how does the trainer know how many watts to make you pedal at? You provide it with your functional threshold power, which is the average power that you can generate for 60 minutes. This way the ride is tailored to your current fitness levels.
One thing that was initially counter-intuitive to me is the fact that you should never ever need to change gears in "erg" mode. If you output too many watts, the trainer will automatically reduce resistance. So all you need to do is try to pedal at a constant cadence in a fixed gear and you'll get the workout that's programmed into the video.
Make sure you have a lot of music handy - riding indoors is incredibly boring and it's hard to stay motivated. I use my HTC HD7 Windows Phone as a music player, which means I can also use it to surf the web in desperate moments!
