After waiting for several months my new turbo trainer has finally arrived. Of course it had to come whilst I was out on holiday, but after paying customs fees and import duty it is finally in my possession. The Wahoo KICKR is an iPhone powered turbo trainer which provides extremely accurate power readings to allow you to tailor your bike sessions exactly as planned. I'll now be able to quantify how my training is (hopefully) increasing my strength.
You can read a detailed review of the trainer here. This is probably the first KICKR in Europe - I've always been an early-adopter of new technology!!!
The unit is really well built and weighs in at about 250N (or, for those of you who deal in mass, we're looking at about 25kg!). As you can see, the rear wheel of the bike is removed and the chain connects directly to the KICKR's rear cassette. The drive is very smooth and the platform is unbelievably stable, even when you're out of the saddle.
You can control all of the functions of the trainer using your iPhone; i.e. setting resistance, interval workouts, erg/power workouts or even simulating different types of bike in different conditions (wind speed, gradients,..). Pretty clever stuff. Plan is to send a virtual course of the Ironman Austria route to the trainer so that I can virtually 'ride' the same roads before the real race in June.
So, after a bit of App downloading I clipped in and set about my first training session. Something ridiculously cool about seeing how much power you're generating as you drive the pedals around their endless loop. After 45 minutes of quad-burning fun, it looked like I needed to quit the day job and join Sir Bradley Wiggins on this years Tour… Averaging 567W and peaking at 657W with a heart rate in the low 130s - that training camp must have paid off ;-)
Unfortunately, I hadn't calibrated the KICKR, so after a quick 15 minute spin this morning, I let the Wahoo Fitness app do its thing and now it is showing the real power figures: under similar conditions I was averaging 320W and maxing out at 353W. So no job as a 'domestique' for me, I'll have to settle for being a domestic god instead!!!
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