I set it up in the garage with a big fan and the overhead door open while the rain continued yet another day. I mounted up a bike, rode it for a few minutes, and to my surprise, found that it was a somewhat pleasant experience. Or at least, it was much, much better than not exercising. Then suddenly the resistance unit seized up with a lot of metal screeching noise that briefly overwhelmed the pleasant sound of the rainfall before silence fell on upon it and I could no longer turn the cranks.
Improve?
I took the unit apart to see if I could fix it--no go. I contacted Performance to see if they had replacement resistance units available to fit--after all, the steel frame for the trainer is still in good shape. Nope, the thing was too darned old. I didn't press the matter with their 100% satisfaction guarantee since I'm not the original owner and at some point, they reduced their guarantee from lifetime to 365 days.Acquire!
It kept raining a lot, so I kept an eye out for trainer deals. As luck would have it, a year ago this week in the midst of Winter, I came across a good sale on the Kurt Kinetic Road Machine Smart, a well reputed, reliable (no leaks!) fluid resistance trainer that provides power, speed and cadence readings. Although it has "Smart" in the name, it is not what is commonly called a "smart trainer" these days. That would be something that has programmatic resistance control via protocols such as ANT+ FE-C to simulate hills in an immersive simulation environment like Zwift, or to vary resistance to load/difficulty in structured training programs. With a plain old fluid resistance unit, I vary the resistance by changing gears on the bike. This works well enough for me.Since I acquired my trainer a year ago, Kurt Kinetic has come out with an updated resistance unit that would be "smart", but is of course a lot more expensive and, unfortunately, uses a proprietary protocol on top of Bluetooth for resistance control. For more information about that, check out DC Rainmaker's article on this.
Hardware and Software Support
The Kurt Kinetic trainers support only Bluetooth Smart, also referred to as Bluetooth 4.x and Bluetooth Low Energy at various levels of precision. Although my research at the time told me that ANT+ was far more widely supported with computer-based trainer software, my initial thought about my indoor trainer setup would be that I'd be pairing it with mobile devices where Bluetooth support is where it's at.I also figured that as time went on, Bluetooth support would grow to approach or even exceed ANT+ since pretty much every laptop and mobile device supports Bluetooth 4.x these days, while almost nothing beyond fitness-specific devices come with ANT+ support.
A year on, my prediction has been wrong so far. There is still very little support for Bluetooth in indoor cycling trainer apps running on Windows. Macs have it somewhat better, but even Windows-based trainer software that support Bluetooth (TrainerRoad and Rouvy) support it only with one specific Bluetooth dongle that is especially programmable. And those products require a subscription to their trainer/coaching service.
If I had to do it all over again, I would have looked harder for a trainer that supports both ANT+ and Bluetooth Smart for the best of both worlds, or at least ANT+ to gain wider software support at the expense of needing an ANT+ adapter and the limitation of having to use a laptop rather than also having a good mobile device option.
Since I don't have a time machine, my next blog posts will go through the trainer setups I've used over the last year, how things have evolved and what things I may try next.
