What was your first trainer?

Uzhelly aftah, we kudnee keep up. If we were luckeh we’d get the dailies once a week like :+1:t2:

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Got my first road bike in 1970, a Schwinn Varsity. Rode on and off for years but have been riding pretty regularly since 2000. I started riding a trainer in group Computrainer sessions ~2010. Got my Saris Hammer in 2016 and it’s still what I use.

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Bkool smart trainer in 2015!
At the time for the money this felt like a revelation.
Had a crappy old wheel with a trainer tyre on so it was a bit of a faff getting my bike on it as it involved changing a wheel and then strapping the bike in.
Plus I lived in a massive shared house and only place I could do it was the living room… Some of my old housemates still joke about it. :frowning:

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I got into cycling in 2018 when I bought a used bike to join a team of work colleagues for a fundraising ride. It was like a light went on for me, and I’ve been riding ever since. My first trainer was a Tacx Blue Matic that I bought in 2019, and since 2020 I’ve been using a Tacx Vortex.

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Back in the 1980s, after getting a bit into cycling around 1985, I got a Racermate Piggyback wind trainer. Found this image online


It attached to the skewer similarly to later stable wind trainers, but the fans were right behind the saddle once it was set, with a stop that rested against the center screw off the rear brake calipers and a resistance roller between the fans to touch the rear bike wheel. These were the days of gigantic phone books in our medium-sized city, so I used the yellow pages to bring the front wheel up to the right level. So dreadfully boring to ride this while watching various TV shows or sports events I had recorded via my VHS recorder. Probably contributed to me being a jogger/runner from the early 90s until about 2010. Much easier to go out for a run in bad weather than be motivated to ride indoor with these trainers!

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I never watched anything while on the trainer in those days. I still can do, although sometimes I will listen to music, no-Vids without watching anything.

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When I started riding on my trainer in my garage I would just stare at my phone which was running the Wahoo app and ride to different speeds. And I would do that for between 30-90 minutes at a time. It was like road running without music. I can and do still occasionally ride a SYSTM Endurance no-vid with no video and just music. Or sometimes no music, either. It’s good for focus and mental training.

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awesome reading everyone’s history. mine goes back a long way but not as far back as some so I don’t feel so old.
Had a throw down Nashbar mag trainer in the late 90’s as well as a set of Performance Rollers. I then bought a Performance / Axiom power trainer…must have been some sort of Computrainer knock off. It was unsupported by 2004 (within a year or two of buying it)

Work/Life interrupted riding until about 2010 when I bought a 1 UP USA wheel on trainer. Kinda fiddly but was a cool trainer.

The first proper smart trainer was a TACX Bushido which was replaced with a Saris Hammer H3. The Bushido is now my throw down trainer for going to races.

I saw some mention above about first videos…In 2010/11 when I started riding again I went in search of “Spinnervals, Coach Troy, Great Harvest Bread” Anyone remember those ? That company had pretty much quit doing training videos but fortunately more internet searching lead me to the original The Sufferfest videos. I want to say it was Angels that I bought first. I still have all of them on a back up drive but I’m too lazy to go check time stamps.

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Yeah we’re pretty good for that.

Man I remember all of those - and getting the Performance and Nashbar catalogs in the mail. So guess you’re old after all.

:joy: :rofl: :joy:

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That reminds me: It slipped my mind that around 2000, I got a set of rollers from Performance Bike that I didn’t use much. Then around 2004, a friend gave me his barely used wheel-on dumb trainer, which I didn’t use either. It’s really the apps and smart trainers, starting with the Computrainers, that got me going.

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When I was little, my dad would ride his rollers in the garage. My parents have some good stories about that. And I remember seeing a lot of my dad’s Bike Nashbar and other cycling magazines lying around. As a young teenage I found that bike gloves worked great for volleyball. :stuck_out_tongue:

I just found this on eBay. It’s the same as my wife’s trainer she bought used off Craigslist in 2014 and I used from 2017 until 2020.

Performance Travel Trac 2000.
IMG_0392

The one in this photo seems to be missing the cable for changing the resistance (mine was broken forever, so not like it’s that big of a loss. lol).

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Sir @Glen.Coutts : The inRide counted the spin of the roller and converted that to power. The power curve of the Road Machine is really easy to calculate. Only of the few trainers that you could do this with.

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I didn’t get my first trainer until I had been living in upstate New York a few years so like 1997 or so. It was a Minoura magnetic with 5 levels of resistance…I could adjust it with my foot without getting off the bike. I actually wasn’t too bad except the plastic housing around the resistance unit got brittle and shattered. Since then I’ve had a couple of Blackburn trainers a set of Nashbar branded Tacx rollers a Saris Magnus I got cheap on eBay, a Saris H3 I got with gift cards and a kicker bike v1 I won in the 2021 ToS raffle!

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Time to join the fun.


This was the first trainer my elder brother and I bought together back in 2014/15. It was a used but nevertheless was well used by the both of us until he moved out. This hunk of metal eventually broke down with there being no replacement cable for resistance dial available locally in Malaysia.

Now I am riding on a set of dumb rollers since 2018 and did the Knighthood on that too #badassness. I do have another dumb wheel-on turbo trainer which I use only for completing HM and FF.

Over the last few days, have been striking a deal with a chap to buy the KICKR v3 from him over this weekend actually and I think it’s quite a good deal as well he’s offering me.

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:exploding_head: :exploding_head: :exploding_head:

A legend revealed. That must’ve been some email to receive!

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That’s about the best raffle prize you can get! Wowza!

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It’s funny, when I got the email I thought it was phishing so I contacted DPF directly to verify it!!

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To date it is the only thing I have ever won and it turns out to be a doozy!!

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Bonus points for the retro ciocc with all the bling.

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I also can’t imagine how someone thinks they can sell a 15 year old dumb trainer on eBay for $70 when the resistance cord is missing/broken.

And if they can, who the heck is buying it? Especially when my wife was able to buy the same model 10 years ago for $20 on Craigslist.

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