The trainers in the room off the bedroom

It's a strange thing to explain to somebody on the mainland: we live in Honolulu, where the weather outside is the weather people fly here for, and we ride our bikes in a spare room staring at a screen. This note is about why that won anyway.

The setup

We don't have a garage. What we have is a room just off our bedroom with two Tacx trainers on a mat, my Cervélo P3 on one and Michelle's pink Parlee on the other, side by side and pointed at a monitor with Zwift on it, with a folding chair for towels and bottles and a fan that's never quite big enough. Those are the bikes we race, so when a race is on the mainland they come off the trainers and go straight into the travel bags for the flight, and when we get home they go back on the trainers, usually the same day.

The problems it solved

The first problem was the road. There are decent bike lanes in places, but you're still dealing with traffic and lights, and the only way to get a consistent hard workout outside is to ride the ridges and do hill repeats, on roads where a lot of drivers aren't paying attention and a lot of them are texting. The second was the dark, because our riding window is dawn and dawn is dark, and riding in traffic in the dark on an island where the roads weren't built with a shoulder in mind is a risk we usually take on the weekend, when there's time to pick the route, and not on a Tuesday at 5 a.m.

The third was the clock. A weekday ride outside is the ride plus getting to a road worth riding plus getting home, while on the trainer an hour is an hour, and past fifty with a day job the hour that's actually an hour is the one that happens. The fourth was the heat, and the trainer has a fan that isn't fighting the humidity, so a hard interval session in that room is a hard interval session and nothing more, which is most of why the zone 2 work finally started working. The last one was honesty, and it's the one that keeps us on them, because the trainer doesn't have a downhill and every minute is a minute of pedaling, so it's a harder hour than the same hour outside and a measured one.

How it went

We bought them on Labor Day weekend 2023, when Garmin had a sale, and signed up for Zwift and Fulgaz the same week. The first videos about it came in late October, when the surprise was that a virtual race hurts exactly as much as a real one, and by November we were hooked, with Zwift Academy in November and the Fondo series in December, and it became the weekday bike, full stop. The same week as the first trainer rides I rode over the Pali Highway for the first time, outside, on a real road with a real climb, and that's the balance we've kept since: the trainers for the weekdays and the specific efforts, the island for the weekends and the long ones. The road is still where the long rides happen, and what the room off the bedroom replaced was the weekday rides that weren't happening at all.

For us the weekday rides weren't happening because of the dark, the traffic, the heat, and the time, and a trainer in a spare room took care of all four. It doesn't do anything for motivation and it won't make you enjoy staring at a wall, but the app helps more than we expected and the hour is a real hour, and it's the only way we found to ride four days a week and still have jobs.