Cycling, not moving.

It has been raining in Brisbane for what feels like months. We have had an amazing amount of rain considering that only a short time ago, a little over a year, the whole state was in drought. I am now at a point where the last dry ride I had was over a month ago and that was a rare occurrence on it's own.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Not only did I go for a wet and soggy trail run to get some excercise but I also bought a fluid trainer. I have long resisted the need to have one of these cruel and evil devices around the home and always thought it was much better to get out on the bike and cop a hiding in the rain rather than sit on a trainer and go nowhere in the dry. I may have been a little wrong.
Hmm, so I set the thing up, got some gear on and went down for my first stint of cycling going nowhere. I set my self an hour time limit with the intention of a 20 minute spin to warm up and 3 sets of intervals with 2 minutes on and a 4 minute rest between each set and then a 20 minute spin down. It wasn't scientific but it should give me a bit of a burn to get me going. I was right! Crikey it hurt. I used my Garmin to track heart rate and cadence to keep a bit of science in it as well as act as the timer. It felt pretty natural and the bike is allowed to move around under you quite a bit. At the end of each interval I was begging for a rest and my legs were burning pretty bad. I definitely felt good for the hurt though.
I did a little research last night on the net and came across a way of adding a bit of motivation to the workouts. There is a site that sells worlkout videos for cycling on stationary trainers. It is spliced together from actual race footage and has prompts through the session to tell you what to do and at what effort. It is a cool interval tool and lets you race Contador, Schleck and a whole heap of others I will never get near in a bike race. Fun stuff. I watched the video this morning and it will get it's maiden tryout  tomorrow. Should be a real vomit fest by the looks of it.

Not glamorous, but it gets the job done......

My hope is that with the trainer I can get stronger. It should allow me to do some really good interval training no matter what the weather is like and no matter how crazy my schedule gets.