Pain Cave

It was a dark and stormy night.

Well, perhaps not as ominous as all of that. Unless you are familiar with pain caves.

A pain cave is a place where a crazed cyclist goes to suffer. Spinning for an hour or two. Sometimes longer. With nothing but suffering.

Suffer, suffer, suffer.

I created a pain cave behind our coach.

Kinda looked like this:

I’ve been racing and riding bikes since I was 14 years old. And, closing in on 62 years old, I haven’t given up riding.

Taking the bike with us on the road wasn’t easy. That smart trainer you see in the picture, the one with the word Tacx written on it, weighs about 50 pounds. My Colnago bike, an Italian steel master built frame, is a bit heavy as road bikes go. It weighs about 19 pounds. My race bike, currently in storage, weighs just under 15 pounds.

I figure I can get to the equivalent weight of my race bike by losing 4 pounds on my body.

Finding a spot to store the bike in the basement of our coach proved challenging. We spent most of yesterday finishing our unboxing and our organizing from our big move. As part of that work we pulled everything out of basement and reorganized it.

After a lot of shuffling and debate on whether to keep our pullout tray or ditch it for more room, we were finally able to make a spot for the bike and for the trainer.

Last night I went out behind the coach and I did a few sessions on Sufferfest just to see how everything would work, moving the bike and the trainer into position and getting all of the requisite measurement systems functioning.

The Tacx gets power for the sensor data that goes to the tablet from the energy I provide when spinning. The coloured lights that you see under the pedals indicate workload. The bright reddish purple colour in the second photo indicates a lot of load for the rider.

The tablet reads the sensor data from the Tacx smart trainer and translates that data into metrics: speed, cadence, heart rate, power amongst many other data points. And, because it is a smart trainer, the software on the tablet controls the resistance to the rider. When the software calls for a hard effort, the smart trainer complies. This is known as ERG (ergometer) mode. The resistance of the trainer is controlled by the software, not by the rider.

I prefer to call it ARGH mode. It can really hurt.

Anyway. Proof that you can take a road bike with you in your motorcoach and you can train outside without needing to plug into electricity or the Internet. In my case, the Sufferfest training videos had already been downloaded to my tablet and my wattage provided the requisite electricity for the trainer. When I finished the ride, I connected back to the Internet and uploaded my ride data to Strava and Training Peaks.

If a ride doesn’t get up to Strava, it never happened.