My experience: Global Ride sent us their 3 set Hawaii Rides DVDs for riding on indoor trainer. I did a workout session on my indoor trainer for each DVD.
Quality: 3/5
Utility: 4/5
Overall: 4/5
Availability: Various Global Ride DVDs are available online at their website for $30 each or $75 for the 3 DVD set.
Summary:
With cold weather approaching (or non-stop 100+ degree days), many cyclist turn indoors riding on a trainer to keep their fitness. After about ten minutes, even the most disciplined rider will be crawling the walls with boredom. Global Ride attempts to make the trainer more bearable with training videos taken from the riders perspective in scenic locations throughout the world. This virtual reality is a good, reasonably priced alternative to the CompuTrainer system but does require you know a bit about training zones to get the most out of it.
Quality and Utility
Global Ride has come up with a clever way to help people train on indoor trainers. They’ve gone to exotic locations around the world and filmed various courses from the rider’s perspective. This creates a sort of virtual reality for the rider imitating a real training ride. Each DVD has a 45 minute training session with 5 minute warm up and cool down montages of pictures from the film locations. Once the training session begins, it is a essentially a first person shot of the road occasional cutaways to a rider on the course.
In the session setup menu, you can choose to turn on/off their new age techno music and choose various coaches to provide encouragement as you are riding. One kind of funny thing in the coach selection is selecting by language. Your choice is Italian, American or Australian. This reminded me Clark Griswald needing his pocket translator in England! Included in each DVD is a bonus video of either weight training, pilates, or yoga.
Quality and Utility
First off, let me say I truly hate riding on the trainer. It has all of the down sides of riding with few of the positives and is mind numbingly boring. I will brave just about any weather element to avoid the trainer. I was a little skeptical of the Global Ride DVDs at first, but they really did work for me. Although the film quality is basic low level camcorder, the shots are done professionally and 10-15 minutes went by without really noticing it. Usually, I am a clock watcher on the trainer counting down the minutes until the workout is over.
I tried the American and the Australian coach voice overs. Being a fan of Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin, I ended up preferring the Commonwealth accent of the Australian coach. While the coaches did help keep me focused on the ride, I do think you need to understand training and heart rate zones to get the most out of the workouts. The coaches say things like “You should be at about 85-90% right now.” I’ve done a lot of zone training, so I knew immediately what that meant, but others might not. Those just getting into training or who have never trained with zones should talk to a coach or get a book like Joe Friel’s Cycling Training Bible.
I found the course selection made a difference in how well I could forget I was on a trainer. The Maui Rollers worked well for me. It was essentially a series of hill climbs followed by downhills where you soft pedal (no coasting!) This was an interval training where you shifted up on the uphills and back down on the flats and downhills. I preferred this much more to the other two sessions Oceanside Ride and StrenDurance in Hawaii. These two focus on strength endurance, basically riding at a high steady tempo for an extended period and had more straight roads, less hills. These are necessary workouts, especially for the time trialist or triathlete, but I found that I started getting the trainer stir crazies after a while on these. The Maui Rollers kept me guessing a bit (will the hill end around the bend?) and thus engaged my brain more.
My biggest gripe with the DVDs were the cut aways backward to a rider on the course sometime for over 30 seconds. Global Ride may be doing this to mix it up a bit or to cover rough video cut transitions, but I found them extremely irritating and distracting. When I’m on an actually ride, I don’t turn around and look at the guy behind me for an extended period of time especially not in the middle of a hard climb. I found these cut aways destroyed the illusion and broke my rhythm. I’d just assume they get rid of these, or if totally necessary limit them to no more than 10 seconds.
Final Thoughts
The Global Ride DVDs are a great way to mix things up when you are on the trainer. Those challenged by the weather, whether winter or more liking in Austin mid-summer, will find these a good way to make it through. Those with children who don’t have time to get out of the house may be interested in these as well. I’m not sure Global Ride is going to get me to ride the trainer often, but when I do, I’ll definitely be reaching for one of these DVDs.
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