indoor training

[kstephenson]

I generally never post about products/services that I use but found something pretty useful for indoor training so I thought it was worthy.  If you put your road bike on an indoor trainer for the winter like I do there's a neat little application that http://www.trainerroad.com/ sells which turns your bike/trainer into a nice computerized trainer of sorts.  I've been using spin videos to keep my fitness levels up but find it difficult to gauge the right effort levels.  With this software it uses your ANT+ sensors and plots them on the screen which isnt really tough to do.  The neato factor is the training Plans they have.  When you run a training plan it plots out the target effort in which you have to match which is the feedback that I was looking for.  The cost is a subscription fee of $10/month.  So I figured I would do this for a few months. 

[matte1401]

This looks very cool.  The threshhold calculation and integration with Sufferfest videos is nice.  Will have to give it a try next winter.
 
I've done the basic version of power training on my Kinetic trainer for a few years now using speed and the power conversion forumula from the Kurt Kinetic website.  I dump the garmin file into Excel and then use the formula that Kurt Kinetic provides to convert speed to power and calculate the average power for specific time periods.  It seems to be pretty accurate and even if it's off some watts, it's definitely accurate directionally.  Kind of tedious that way though and it looks like this would automate that and give your brain something else to think about than how bored you are.