Why now? Back on the turbo after a decade away

I used to be an absolute fiend for the turbo as a younger man. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it though. I was at quite an unhappy point of my life; after university, trying to find my feet as an adult, a little lonely, struggling with some obsessive weight control, and relatively new to cycling. I’d started racing cyclocross with my local club, and so as each winter rolled around I’d dig out an old, cheap magnetic trainer, fit a turbo tyre to a spare wheel and do an hour of intervals four or five nights a week after work.

I had no concept of training properly then. More riding = more fast. Harder = better. Active recovery? Never heard of him. One of the first things I wrote after joining Cyclingnews was a piece on my relationship with cycling and eating disorders, which is worth a read for a bit of context. The short version though is that I used the turbo as a stick to beat myself with for a long time, alone in a basement flat in Leeds. It was something, along with my body weight, that I could control. I was fresh out of university, was never in a position to buy a power meter, and to be honest despite having a heart rate monitor I never really put the time in to learn about training with it properly. I’d just run myself ragged staring at a stopwatch. 

I was fast, though. Not as fast as I am now, it must be said, now that I’m eating properly (and with access to the best bike gear on the planet too, it must be said), but I was fit and strong, but equally fragile. Prone to illness. Prone to injury. 

In what I now think of as a lucky twist of fate I slipped my L5S1 vertebrae. I couldn’t sit down for six months, and I couldn’t ride for two years. It gave me a lot of time to reflect on what I liked about riding, and what I didn’t. Now, mostly recovered save for the occasional frustrating flare up, I am happier, healthier, faster, and I haven’t touched a turbo trainer in the best part of a decade. 

I’m not going to go so far as to say it’s a point of pride that I haven’t, but I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a part of me that leant into the fact that every winter I’d be out testing waterproof jackets rather than smart trainers. However, over the last few years, as I have slowly crept back towards ‘performance’ cycling more and more, a pattern has emerged. Despite my best efforts, and despite having all the winter kit a man could ask for, my mileage over winter would naturally decrease, and with it my fitness. Roll onto spring, usually the first sunny weekend in March, and I’d head out on a few very long rides to try and catch up, usually ending up with a knee injury of some kind. I am, sadly, still a little injury prone.

So, this year, I finally relented. To tell you the truth I remain more than a little apprehensive about opening the door again to those parts of my riding history that have been more than a little destructive, but my frustration with summer injuries has surpassed my worries about overdoing it. 

While this job isn’t necessarily all sunshine and roses (see earlier mention of testing waterproof jackets for instance) it is certainly enviable in that I can get access to a lot of kit with relative ease. Upon hearing that I was thinking of getting back into indoor training, Wahoo was kind enough to sort me out with not only a KICKR MOVE, but also a KICKR CLIMB, and a KICKR HEADWIND so as to give me the best possible chance of a dramatic damascene conversion somewhere in Watopia - I think it may be some time before the literal road to Damascus gets added to an indoor training app. 

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I know some riders genuinely live for riding indoors. Our Associate Editor, Josh, rides inside more than anyone I know for good, race prep reasons, but I am keen for it to be an addition to, rather than a replacement for riding my bike outside. I can already feel the tug of chasing metrics, just like I get now I’m also back using Strava again, so for now I want to keep to riding indoors because I want to, not because I feel I have to.

Do I want to? Well, that’s the mad thing: Yes. The turbo training I knew is so far removed from the modern world of indoor riding I’d say the two are essentially different terms. Indoor riding far better describes the added realism that all the peripheral tech has added into the mix, whereas ‘turbo training’ seems a little outdated as a descriptor. Immediately I was pretty taken aback at how different the ride feel was. No wheel slip, no thinking about clicking up the magnetic resistance dial for the next 30 second effort, just buttery smooth pedalling.

I think my Damascus moment won’t necessarily be halfway up Alpe du Zwift, though I am keen to see how my virtual time up it matches my real time up the IRL French goliath. Instead what has really got me craving more is the social side of indoor riding. So far I have dabbled in the odd structured training ride, but one virtual ride so far has got under my skin, and all it was was a quick jaunt up (virtual) Box Hill with my pal Felix. 

Neither of us had done a ‘meetup’ before in Zwift, but after a bit of back and forth we both arrived in CGI Surrey and rode together, on the phone to each other, having a bit of a catch up, and a bit of a sprint at the end. It was charming, and that was it. No nearly being sick. No tasting blood. No suffering (oh how I hate that word in cycling - It can go in the bin along with ‘pain cave’). Just getting some miles in with a friend, separated by about a mile. It was wonderful, and such a refreshing change from doggedly churning out over/under intervals week in, week out as I used to do. 

After this ride I did end up just cruising around a virtual world and I’m beginning to see the appeal, not just of Zwift but all indoor training apps. I’ve also used the KICKR setup to spin my way around the sunset lit real roads of Corsica and, for some reason I’m yet to fathom, the entirely un-picturesque roads of rural Belgium. Get fitter by accident, I think, is the way it goes, rather than building your winter solely around riding inside. It’s super subtle, and functionally the same, but a virtual hill is somehow a very different proposition than a nebulous effort interval.

The kit is cool, too. I am an unashamed bike gear fetishist - I don’t think I could do this job without that to be frank - and the sliding turbo, gradient adjusting KICKR CLIMB and the smart fan are all genuinely exciting to me, mostly because they’re just far less horrible to use for extended periods. The mad thing is that despite being worlds apart in terms of complexity, the time to set up and get underway with all this new tech is more or less the same as getting an old mag trainer out and having to swap the rear tyre, then get some sort of stopwatch app out on your phone for the latest horror session. Everything pairs more or less instantly, sings from the same hymn sheet, and while it may look complex the technical barriers to entry have been minimised to such a degree that it’s basically foolproof. 

What’s more exciting to me though, beyond all the new toys, is being able to use this tech to spend some catching up with old friends I no longer ride with. My best friend for years tried to get me onto Zwift, and now I can finally join him. My dad too, who picked up a smart trainer over lockdown like so many others, is on my list. 

I do absolutely get the appeal for turbo as a full on training tool, and maybe in due course I’ll get to that, but for now I am leaning into the fun, the social, and keeping it as an addition to, rather than a replacement for, my outdoor rides, and hopefully come next spring I won’t feel I have to play catchup anymore.